Nature Notes: A Maine Naturalist Afield 2/22/26: Molluscan Mystery in Acadia, Part 1

Host: Celeste Mittelhauser
Producer: Glen Mittelhauser

Part 1 of an essay by Jovan Grollino introduces listeners to the surprising diversity of nudibranchs and sea slugs in Acadia’s tide pools and the obsessive pull of studying these intricate marine mollusks. The episode follows the discovery of an unfamiliar aeolid nudibranch on Mount Desert Island and the early clues suggesting it may be something new.

More information about Maine Natural History can be found at mainenaturalhistory.org.

About the hosts:
Glen Mittelhauser founded Maine Natural History Observatory (MNHO) in 2003 to fill the need for an organization that specializes in collecting, interpreting, and maintaining datasets for understanding changes in Maine’s plant and wildlife populations.  Glen received his Bachelor’s in Human Ecology from College of the Atlantic in 1989 with a focus in the biological sciences and received his Master of Science degree in Zoology (with a focus on ornithology and statistics) from the University of Maine in 2000. Glen was the Managing Editor for Northeastern Naturalist and Southeastern Naturalist for 18 years and has served as external graduate faculty for 3 graduate student committees at the University of Maine.  Glen currently serves on the Baxter State Park Research Committee.

Logan Parker is an Ecologist residing in Waldo County, Maine. Logan started the Maine Nightjar Monitoring Project in 2017 and brought the project (and his passion for bird conservation) to MNHO when he joined the team in 2018. Logan is heavily involved in the ongoing Maine Bird Atlas where he both coordinates and participates in the project’s special species surveys. When “off the clock”, Logan enjoys birding, writing, gardening, and working alongside his wife, Hallee, on their off-grid home in the Maine woods. Logan is also a wildlife photographer and shares photos and field notes through his project, Here In The Wild.

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What’s the Word on Maine Street? 2/21/26

What’s the Word on Maine Street?, hosted by Sarah Pebworth, is a weekly short feature Saturdays at 9:30am looking at local literary and visual arts events and offerings!

About the host:
Sarah Pebworth leads the steering committee for Word—a Blue Hill Literary Arts Festival, founded in 2017 and held each October. She serves on the boards of the Cultural Alliance of Maine and Lawrence Family Fitness Center YMCA. Since February 2023 Sarah has written “Shared Seas and Common Grounds,” a column published in the Penobscot Bay Press’s Weekly Packet. She and her wife Julie Jo Fehrle live in Blue Hill.

Theme music: Ross Gallagher is a bassist who grew up in East Blue Hill, ME, and currently lives between Bath, ME and Brooklyn, NY, where he works with a wide variety of musical artists. Infinite Blues is a cut from his recently released neon night, an excursion into an ambient/electronic musical world built around rhythmic bass ostinatos, clouds of processed looping electronic atmospheres, and melody. By turns both subtle and unapologetically noisy, the songs are a collection of luminous constellations, roved between by a band of texturally minded instrumental improvisers.

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Earthwise 2/21/26: The Element of Ice

Producer/Host: Anu Dudley

About the host: Rev. Dr. Anu Dudley is an ordained Pagan minister and a retired history professor. She continues to teach classes, including the three-year ordination curriculum at the Temple of the Feminine Divine, and others such as History of the Goddess, Paganism 101, Ethical Magic, and Introduction to the Runes. Currently she is writing a book about how to cast the runes using their original Goddess meanings. She lives in the woods off-grid in a small homesteading community in Central Maine.

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Democracy Forum 2/20/26: Constitutional Crisis: What Does Civic Courage Look Like?

Host: Ann Luther, League of Women Voters of Maine
Production Assistance: Linda Washburn, Joel Mann

Democracy Forum: Participatory Democracy, encouraging citizens to take an active role in government and politics.

This month:
We’ll talk about how civic courage and neighborliness create solidarity under stress. How are communities under pressure holding it together? — in Minneapolis, in Maine, and in other communities around the country. What do we have in common with pro-democracy resistance movements around the world?

Guest/s:
Oliver Kaplan, Associate Professor, Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs, University of Denver, Visiting Scholar, Stanford University, Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.
Amy DeBeck, Minister, Unitarian Universalist Church of Castine.
Julia Edwards, SoPo Helps Mutual Aid Network.

To learn more about this topic:
Visit LWVME.org

About the host:
Ann Luther currently serves as Treasurer of the League of Women Voters of Maine and leads the LWVME Advocacy Team. She served as President of LWVME from 2003 to 2007 and as co-president from 2007-2009.

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Around Town 2/20/26: Local News, Culture and Events

Host/Producer: Amy Browne

LD 395, An Act to Restore Access to Federal Laws Beneficial to the Wabanaki Nation

LD 785, An Act to Enact the Remaining Recommendations of the Task Force on Changes to the Maine Indian Claims Settlement Implementing Act

Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project (ILAP) update

Northern Light Eastern Maine Medical Center’s 2026 Youth Mental Health Summit

About the host:
Amy Browne started out at WERU as a volunteer news & public affairs producer in 2000, co-hosting/co-producing RadioActive with Meredith DeFrancesco. She joined the team of Voices producers a few years later, and has been WERU’s News & Public Affairs Manager since January, 2006. In addition to RadioActive, Voices, Maine Currents and Maine: The Way Life Could Be, Amy also produced and hosted the WERU News Report for several years. She has produced segments for national programs including Free Speech Radio News, This Way Out, Making Contact, Workers Independent News, Pacifica PeaceWatch, and Live Wire News, and has contributed to Democracy Now and the WBAI News Report. She is the recipient of the 2014 Excellence in Environmental Journalism Award from the Sierra Club of Maine, and Maine Association of Broadcasters awards for her work in 2017 and 2021.

Theme music: BreakBeat Chemists I, 2015
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International License

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Justice Radio 2/19/26: NAACP Maine State Prison Branch President Foster Bates

Host/s: Linda Small
Editor: Sarah Johnson
Music: Samuel James
Justice Radio is a WMPG production.

Justice Radio: Tackling the hard questions about our criminal legal system in Maine.

This week: Foster Bates talks with Linda about the NAACP’s work in Maine State Prison.

Guest/s: Foster Bates.

About the hosts:
The Justice Radio team includes:

Catherine Besteman is an abolitionist educator at Colby College. Her research and practice engage the public humanities to explore abolitionist possibilities in Maine. In addition to coordinating Freedom & Captivity, she has researched and published on security, militarism, displacement, and community-based activism with a focus on Somalia, post-apartheid South Africa, and the U.S. She has published nine books, contributed to the International Panel on Exiting Violence, and received recent fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations.

MacKenzie Kelley is a formerly incarcerated woman in long term recovery. She is a teachers assistant for inside-out courses through MIT. MacKenzie works at the Maine Prisoner Reentry Center as a reentry specialist, peer support and recovery coach. She is the program director for Reentry Sisters, a program designed to assist women reentering the community from prison.

Linda Small is the founder and executive director of Reentry Sisters, a reentry support organization specializing in a gender-responsive and trauma-informed approach for women, serving Maine and beyond. She is a Project Coordinator for the Maine Prisoner Advocacy Coalition. Linda serves on the Maine Prison Education Partnership board at UMA and the New England Commission for the Future of Higher Education in Prison through The Educational Justice Institute at MIT.

The Young People’s Caucus (YPC) builds pathways for young people who have been directly impacted by systems involvement and systemic oppression to have a genuine voice and power in decision making in Maine. We create opportunities and connect young people, agency partners, and policy makers to work together to create public systems that support and empower all young people, with a focus on youth who have experienced the juvenile justice and foster care systems.

MIDC: Maine Indigent Defense Center is a criminal defense firm accepting only court-appointed cases in primarily Cumberland and York counties. We bring a holistic approach to every criminal case, collaboratively addressing our clients’ problems outside the courtroom, which are the problems that often bring them into court in the first place. By addressing these issues we believe our clients are able to achieve better outcomes in and out of court. MIDC was formed in December of 2007 amid cuts to funding for court appointed attorneys. Today, MIDC splits time between representing individual clients, working with students, collaborating with other professionals in our community to work towards a fully holistic defense model, and advocating for reform by providing a critical voice at the legislature and other forums.

Robert J. Ruffner: Robert Joseph Ruffner, Director of MIDC. grew up in New England and is a graduate of Clark University (’92). Rob attended Washington University in St. Louis School of Law (’96) where, to no one’s surprise, he was Managing Editor of the Devil’s Advocate. After a short stint as a defense attorney Rob worked as a prosecutor in St. Louis, Missouri and Portland, Maine. In 2001 Rob returned to his true calling, criticizing the State Criminal Defense, forming his own practice to focus exclusively on criminal (almost entirely indigent) defense. A Life Member of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Rob is also member of the Maine State Bar Association and Maine Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and was the recipient of the 2009 MACDL, Unsung Hero Award for “highest level of commitment, passion and tireless pursuit of justice in the representation of indigent defendants”. Rob is never far from his three senior Labrador Retriever partners, Luke (8), Gideon (3) (featured on Our Team page) and Flynne (6 months). When he isn’t Monday morning quarterbacking the Commission during public comment or poking the State in the eye with a stick, Rob spends as much time as possible with Luke, Gideon and Flynne in a tent in the remote woods of Vermont, from where he “Zooms” back to court in Maine … and pokes the State a little more.

Emily Goulette: Emily is a Maine native and 2019 graduate of Colby College. Emily then earned her J.D. from the University of Maine School of Law (2023) where she worked in Cumberland Legal Aid Clinic’s Youth Justice Clinic representing youth in criminal and education matters. Emily assisted in re-instituting Maine Law’s chapter of the Student Animal League Defense Fund while working for the Animal Refuge League of Greater Portland. Emily also interned for Webb Law Firm during law school, assisting on misdemeanor and felony cases. Before joining the Maine Indigent Defense Center, Emily advocated for Maine’s homeless population supporting youth and their families through Homeless Youth Services at the Opportunity Alliance in South Portland, ME. Emily (alongside her service dog Finley) now serves as the Director of Policy and Development for MIDC, creating new MIDC initiatives, running the robust student programming, and kick-starting Maine’s newest non-profit – The Center for Indigent Defense Studies. Emily lives in Hollis, ME with her horse (Chevy) and problem-causing dog and cat (Stanley and Lennie, respectively).

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