HARPSWELL

T rail work had to wait for another day, as Wednesday’s morning showers prevented the Harpswell Heritage Land Trust’s active volunteer trail building squad from clambering through brush with loppers in hand.

Ben Godsoe, a summer intern at HHLT, was out in the elements, shrugging off the light rainfall to explore the progress of the new trail system on the land trust’s Curtis Farm Preserve.

“It starts with lots of walking,” said Godsoe of laying out the trail system. “You hang flags to designate a route, and then a smaller crew comes through with handsaws and clears larger obstructions.

“There are a number of places like this where the trail gets built into a hill,” said Godsoe, brushing twigs aside below a felled tree to reveal a shallow L-shaped cut in the earth. “This is called a bench. You can feel it in your ankles, it’s easier to walk on, but fortunately we don’t have to do too much digging on the trail.”

Some of the work may be labor-intensive, but out on the wooded trails wedged between Basin Cove and Curtis Cove, it hardly seems burdensome — provided volunteers prepare with a generous dose of insect repellant.

“Curtis Farm Preserve is the biggest undeveloped piece of property in South Harpswell,” said Julia McLeod, HHLT’s outreach coordinator. “It’s a really interesting mix of habitats that are important for wildlife: it has fields, forest, wetlands and two coves with productive mudflats that are also commercially important.”

Land trust work in coastal areas usually concerns preserving smaller properties than inland, both because the undeveloped properties are smaller parcels and because the land values are higher, said McLeod. The 86 acres now protected at the Curtis Farm Preserve is a significant land gain for HHLT and the community who have historically used the land in a variety of ways, she said.

“We call it Curtis Farm Preserve because it is a historic farm site,” said McLeod, “but then also it has a history of being used by the community — there used to be beanhole suppers here and there used to be a ballfield up on the field.

“We see often people just wandering around here, so its nice that we can keep open this piece of property that people are accustomed to using,” said McLeod. “If it was bought up by someone private who decide to develop it, it wouldn’t necessarily be open to the public to continue to use it.”

The land trust acquired the land in two parcels: The first parcel was acquired in 2011, the second in 2013. Public fundraising contributed significantly to the purchase, as did two grants from the federal National Coastal Wetlands Conservation Grant Program, and the Maine Natural Resources Conservation Program.

During a series of public forums the land trust conducted to gather input about the possible uses of the preserve, a Friends of Curtis Farm Preserve group was established, said McLeod, who are developing a wildlife habitat management plan and a public use plan.

In the middle of Curtis Farm Preserve, sheltered from the rain by the forest canopy, elementary students in HHLT’s Nature Day Camp were busy building a different kind of trail system — one for some of the smaller creatures that inhabit the preserve.

“One of the things people said what they really wanted to see was that this property was used as an educational tool,” said Godsoe, noting that Harpswell Coastal Academy students have also been involved in mapping invasive species on the preserve in cooperation with the land trust.

“The (day campers) get a piece of string, and their job is to create a trail for a little teeny critter,” said McLeod, an assistant leader at the camp. “They explain where the start point of the trail is, where the end trail is, and what the critter is using the trail to get to. It’s a way to look at things on a really small scale, which in a big forest you don’t always get to do.”

Red squiggles of string swirl around the trunks of trees, over rocks and under fallen branches, but day campers Molly and Calena hold aloft a unique portable trail system they’ve developed for slugs.

“It’s a slug swing trail,” said Molly of a knotted, triangular structure of string and wood before dashing back to her group, clutching the swing and one precariously positioned gastropod.

Godsoe, who recently graduated from the University of Southern Maine’s Muskie School of Public Service with a master’s degree in Community Planning and Development, has been contributing to the public use plan as well as heading volunteer trail building days.

The trail system designed will extend less than two miles, with access points planned on Harpswell Neck Road and Basin Point Road.

Still in a draft phase, some of the preserve plan’s particulars are not definite yet, said Godsoe, but they may include some light infrastural improvements. An area near the central loop of the trail has been designed to be cleared for a picnic area, as has a more accessible area near Basin Cove.

Harpswell Heritage Land Trust will host another trail building day from 9 a.m. to noon on Saturday, Aug.16. For more information, call HHLT at 721-1121 or Ben Godsoe at 578-9613.

rgargiulo@timesrecord.com