Acadia National Park

Recalling the conservation and philanthropy that launched Acadia National Park a century ago, Friends of Acadia has marked the park's 100th birthday with a campaign to raise $25 million to tackle the park's "most urgent challenges ... and ensure that Acadia will thrive for many years to come."

With spring migration over and fall shorebird migration a couple weeks away, this is the lazy part of the birding year. It’s time to float placidly on a northern lake and listen to the loons. Everyone from Henry David Thoreau to Aldo Leopold has tried to describe the song of the loon, all failing miserably compared to the experience of actually hearing it on a foggy dawn.

As a birder and naturalist, I have a love/hate relationship with roads and parking lots in national parks. On the one hand, it’s not difficult to agree with Ed Abbey that all pavement is the opposite of progress. Roads kill things outright and bring more tourists, a certain percentage of which will be destructive in their own way. Then I stop and think about the best birding spots I’ve found in the parks – and a majority of them of were either in a parking lot or within sight of some kind of pavement.

It was mere happenstance, two events more than 2,000 miles apart, but the irony was inescapable: At a time when the Western United States is losing a "football field worth of natural area" to development every 2.5 minutes, an opportunity to set aside nearly 100,000 acres in the Northeast as part of the National Park System was deemed within reach.