It’s March, and that means maple sugar season in Maine.
At least, it used to.
Maine winters have shifted significantly due to climate change, bringing not only warmer temperatures but also much more volatile conditions, like extreme warm and cold snaps. Maine Maple Sunday, a staple holiday in the state, falls on March 22 this year. At one point in time, this date marked the height of a typical sugaring season, but by this date in recent years, most maple operations would have begun to wrap up. Here at the College, the Outing Club started up this year’s operation in mid-February, but in many years, tree tapping begins even earlier.
Maple sugaring season is the several-week stretch in between winter and spring when daytime temperatures sit above freezing and nighttime temperatures stay below. A common rule of thumb is 25 degrees to 35 degrees fahrenheit, although any freeze-thaw cycle will cause sap to run. Sugarmakers, as they’re commonly called, bore holes at about waist height into mature sugar maples, affixing tubing to the spigot in the tree. Many trees may be connected together into a sap line, which runs downhill through the sugarbush, or grove of maple trees, into a bucket or even directly to the saphouse. If you’ve never seen a maple sugaring operation before, the action usually centers around the stove; hours of boiling is needed to thicken 40 gallons of sap into just one gallon of syrup.
I grew up tapping trees, though we never produced much more syrup than we could use ourselves. I loved sugaring season: I’d get off the bus on warm afternoons to find melting snowbanks and a muddy driveway. I’d excitedly check the sap buckets that we’d placed downhill of our sap lines, replacing full buckets and lugging the sap to our little three-pan evaporator. More and more though, the season would start in early February — weeks ahead of its historical timeline — and extreme temperature jumps caused the sap to spoil or lose its sweet taste. Throughout the winter, we’d accumulate only a fraction of the historical snowpack, which is necessary to insulate and protect the roots. The resulting sugar seasons were shorter and more unreliable, as well as undeniable proof that Maine’s iconic winter had changed.
As with many things, climate change may not eliminate maple sugaring in Maine, but the industry has already had to adapt. Many sugarmakers are augmenting their taps with vacuum pressure, which substantially increases the yield. Reverse osmosis systems help cut down on the amount of energy-intensive boiling needed to reduce the sap, and electric evaporators are far more efficient than the traditional wood-fired open pan method. Still, in the long term, sugar maple habitat will shift north, and decreased productivity will squeeze the margin of profit needed to sustain a sugaring operation that much tighter. It’s an uphill battle.
Most of us spend just four short years in Maine during our time at Colby College. In that time, events like this winter, which has been the coldest in decades, create the impression that climate change is still a problem for the future. But the overarching trends are pretty clear: Maine’s winters are warming — noticeably and quickly. And as a state dependent on its natural resources for not only its economy but its way of life, Maine has a lot to lose.
~ Brynne Robbins `26
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