Redington is special - and it's no place for industry.

For more than 10 years, Maine Audubon and other conservation groups have encouraged this project's developer to consider less ecologically sensitive sites, but to no avail.

The Redington site is not the right place to clear-cut, bulldoze, and blast to make way for:

Thirty 400-foot-tall turbines, each with three 150-foot-long spinning blades;
More than 12 miles of new roads fragmenting a large forest area and constructed on steep, fragile mountain slopes vulnerable to erosion; and
At least 10 miles of powerlines stretching across and impacting the wild area.

Risks to Wildlife & Fragile Habitats

The Redington project will harm multiple important state resources including: 19 species listed as endangered or threatened or of special concern, an exemplary natural area, migratory birds and bats, and a large block of unfragmented roadless habitat.

• This is a very special place. Maine's Western High Mountains region has the highest concentration of high elevation areas and high peaks in the state. Redington Mountain, 4000 feet tall, lies within a one of Maine’s largest roadless corridors encompassing over 35,000 acres. Access and summit roads will essentially bisect this large unfragmented forest area, eliminating the central part of Maine’s largest roadless corridor, and one of the only areas along the 2,000-mile length of the Appalachian Trail still unencumbered by development.

• The Redington Pond Range is an ecologically sensitive and significant mountain and has been specifically zoned as a protected mountain area. The upper elevations of Redington and Crocker Mountains encompass two of only five superb examples in the state of the rare Fir-Heartleaved Birch Subalpine Forest natural community.

• The area is a stronghold for Bicknell’s thrush, a mountain bird that breeds only in subalpine areas of the Northeast. Clearcutting and subsequent blasting of the top tier of bedrock from the two mountains and along the entire length of the mountain top will result in permanent removal of prime nesting habitat for this thrush, one of the state’s highest conservation priorities.

• Flooding from the project’s storm-water system and the effects of construction of roads and turbine clearings would destroy the habitat of one of Maine’s rarest mammals, the northern bog lemming. Listed as threatened, the northern bog lemming inhabits only five places in Maine.

• The project could have an immediate and drastic impact on resident and migratory populations of birds and bats.

• There is a high level of interest in land conservation in the region including efforts at nearby Saddleback Mountain and Mount Abraham.

• Erosion and disruption of hydrological flow patterns caused by the proposed project and its associated infrastructure will harm the fragile high-elevation soils, small wetlands, and seeps (habitats that are particularly sensitive to disturbance and permanent alteration), destroying the habitat of the subalpine vegetation important to the plant and animal communities in the region.

photo of Bicknell's thrush by T. Brant Ryder