They only spend the winter in eastern Mass (this one is probably a visitor from Canada) but there are nesting spots scattered all over western and northern New England. If you walk up and down the Charles this time of year and closely scan the water and skies you'll have a decent chance of spotting one. I had one fly right over my car at the Route 20 bridge in Watertown one time.

Oh definitely I was just saying that the popular image of old-timey Vermont is something like Currier and Ives or Norman Rockwell when it was surprisingly cutting edge for its time and place. If people took a time machine to any rural town here in the 19th century, it would probably be unrecognizable in many places because of the sheer number of small mills and workshops. Nowadays only the farmhouses and mill city manses have survived and so they dominate the popular imagery of the historical landscape.

I think people would be really surprised at the level of small-scale mechanized industry there used to be in nearly every rural village in northern New England in the 19th century. This area is often romanticized as a bucolic agricultural region but the truth is that agriculture was never that lucrative here, we'd never be as developed as we are without the machinists and blacksmiths. The steam-powered automobile was invented in Hinsdale, NH in the 1890s, and the guy who created the prototype of the modern elevator that enabled the construction of skyscrapers grew up in tiny Halifax, VT

In Vermont they only live in the boreal forests of the Northeast Kingdom and high mountain summits.

Don't worry about it, I did the same thing at a stoplight one time and unfortunately a cop was right there. I had a totally clean record and I explained the situation and thankfully he understood and let me go (not before a stern warning lol). I occasionally suffer from really intense anxiety too, I know how you feel and I know how situations like this can scramble your mind. And I know how we're all struggling to save money in this insane economy and how even one ticket can be a real burden on a lot of people. But I promise you'll be ok here!

Yeah I'm prepared to get downvoted like I always do on this topic but whatever. I think my views are also mostly in line with the "all of the above" commenter above. But the Vienna case is just too successful and long lasting to be ignored.

I think the government needs to be more directly involved in the construction and ownership of housing stock. There's a proven track record in this country of rent control in combination with heavy public investment in housing, we did it during the Truman administration and it helped unleash decades of abundant, affordable housing. I'm honestly amazed at all the anti-rent-control people on here who aren't aware of that history. Unfortunately state and federal government began neglecting public housing in the 60s which has led to their current decrepit state and notoriety for crime and whatnot. I encourage people to read up on the wonderful communities that flourished between 1935 and 1960 in public housing complexes when we actually invested serious money in them. They are not lost causes in the way most people have been made to believe.

The city of Vienna has one of the most successful public-housing-and-rent-control systems in the world and it's been going strong for almost a century. The majority of units there are publicly owned and the competition with the government helps keep the market-rate stock relatively low-priced. You can rent spacious, borderline luxurious apartments in the public stock for under 1000 euros a month, many as low as 600. We'd do well to emulate them.

We have to stop building out and start building up, no more sprawling suburbs which promise a mix of city and country but deliver on neither (there are so many "quiet" suburbs outside 128 that are just choked with traffic from 7am - 7pm every day).

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/state-by-state/maine-population-change-between-census-decade.html

There's no elegant breakdown of the data but the best way to get a sense of it is by choosing the "[race] in combination" drop down at the Census link above for each race/ethnicity. The two largest non-white ones reported with others are Native at almost 2% and Black at about 1%. Total mixed is 4.7% and white in combo is 4.6% which means the vast majority of mixed are white and something else -- makes sense given Northern New England has been the whitest part of the country for a very long time.

Conway State Forest in western Mass is a really secluded spot that has a few beaver dams and marshes. Last time I was there I got a little spooked by a beaver felling a small tree and dragging it through the woods lol it was so loud I thought it was a black bear

Chickatawbut Tower in the Blue Hills. The boat ramp on Lynn Harbor right at the beginning of the Nahant Causeway near the rotary. Fisherman's Beach parking lot in Swampscott

I always tell people here in the States that Eastern Canada has scenery comparable to the West Coast and they don't believe me. Route 132 out to Percé and 138 between Quebec City and Tadoussac are just as dramatic as any of the coastal highways out west. I did both of those routes for the first time without knowing much about them and was totally blown away.

Southern Maine and SE NH had a wicked bad wildfire outbreak in 1947. The worst of it was in Lyman and Waterboro where a huge percentage of homes were charred to ashes. We're not totally immune to it and that sort of thing becoming more common is definitely not out of the question around here, especially in an extreme 2.5C+ increase scenario. In the Midwest they're already seeing huge dust storms in Iowa and extreme wildfires in western Ontario (which gave us most of our sun-blotting wildfire smoke in summer 2021). The arid zone is slowly inching east and while it won't overtake the continent anytime soon there's definitely a small risk of increasing droughts in the humid zone.

I feel like this is a class thing rather than a regional thing. As a native New Englander who's spent his whole life eating strawberry rhubarb pie in season, relying on my grandmother's recipe, I too have been totally dumbstruck by people who've never had it and in my experience those people have generally been rich/upper middle class, people who've grown up with the money to afford more cosmopolitan pallettes. But that's mainly anecdotal, I could be wrong though. Apparently it also originated in Germany and the UK so there could be an ethnic component to it as well. It's one of those things whose recipes have been passed down in families for generations but it hasn't become a recognizable, marketable staple like apple or cherry pie.

Yup but probably only the hills of Ptown and Truro. Everything else is too far. I'm not sure where on the cape this photo was taken but I wouldn't be surprised if it was Ptown

Not to mention the whole Boston-Northampton project was first conceived in the early to mid-90s. This has been a 30 year long process with no end in sight. It's part of the reason why, as much as I love off-road biking, I've become a bit of a skeptic about the rail trail movement. And I'm wondering if it's a good idea to be using these prime rights of way for bike use exclusively -- maybe we need to be promoting the restoration of rail instead or maybe even dual use if possible? Because of the other two east-west lines across the state this isn't a huge issue for MCRT specifically but could be elsewhere. At the very least we need to overcome suburban NIMBYism and to do that we need to resurrect Sylvester Baxter's visionary 1890 plan for Boston to become an integrated metropolis/city-state.