I see that the Friends of Merrymeeting Bay plan to sue the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in a new attempt to place the Kennebec River Atlantic salmon on the endangered list. The lawsuit follows a 2005 petition filed by the Friends which the Fish & Wildlife people ignored, despite federal law which requires a regulating agency to respond to such a petition within a year.

No one knows for sure how the bay got its name, but it is certainly a merry meeting place of waters, fish and wildlife. It's where the Kennebec and the Androscoggin, two of Maine's largest rivers, mix and mingle, joined by the Cathance, the Muddy, the Abagadasset and the Eastern rivers, all six of which drain a 10,000 square mile watershed comprising forty percent of Maine and a piece of New Hampshire. The combined waters, mainly fresh -- the tide rarely overcomes the flow of the rivers to penetrate the waters of the bay -- empty into the tidal lower Kennebec and glide down past Bath, where they float the warships built at the Iron Works, and thence to the sea, past Fort Popham and Pond Island light. The bay has been for millennia a hospitable staging point for the spawning runs of anadromous fish including the Atlantic salmon, American shad, alewives, smelt, stipers, and even two varieties of sturgeon. Pogies, bluefish, eels and tomcod have shared the waters with trout, bass, perch and a variety of baitfish. A long list of native and migratory waterfowl, shorebirds and songbirds, and mammals from moose to mice find bountiful habitat around, in and on the bay. The late John Cole wrote eloquently and passionately of fishing and gunning on the bay.

In short, Merrymeeting Bay is an environmental treasure, a cornucopia of lifeforms and a place whose waters and creatures should be preserved and protected forever. But for the past several years the regulators have become deregulators, and the protectors have failed to protect. You might think about joining the Friends in their fight to protect the Atlantic salmon of the Kennebec and all the other myriad creatures of a priceless ecosystem. As an angler, you have an obligation, I figure.