Two summer residents of Maine – the Bicknell’s thrush and the blueback herring – were in the news this week.

The thrush played a role in a new global warming report and in a shift in wind energy politics. The herring, meanwhile, surfaced in an historic river restoration agreement.

The stories are sure to affect Maine’s human residents, too. But here’s a bird’s-eye view, and a fish’s-eye view, of the week’s environmental news.

The Bicknell’s thrush is a small brownish-gray songbird that migrates each year from Central America to Maine and Canada. It stays in high-elevation forests and is more often heard than seen. Its song is a series of flute-like notes that finishes on a high-note. You can hear it here.

The bird’s sub-alpine habitat in Maine is under pressure for two directly competing reasons: global warming and windfarms. And it’s been a good-news-bad-news kind of week for the little bird.

A report issued Wednesday by the Union of Concerned Scientists named the Bicknell’s thrush as an example of a species that may disappear from Maine as the planet heats up.

Sub-alpine habitat is highly sensitive to a hotter climate, and so is Maine’s spruce-fir forest. If global warming emissions continue at the current pace, the report said, Bicknell’s thrush would essentially retreat to Mt. Katahdin and then disappear entirely by late in this century.

The Bicknell’s thrush also has been at the center of debates over whether to put wind farms on the ridges of western Maine’s mountains. The issue puts the bird, and some people who want to protect it, in a bit of a tough spot.

Mountaintop roads and wind turbines could harm chunks of its already limited habitat. But without a real aggressive shift in energy production away from fossil fuels, scientists warn that global warming could wipe out all their habitat in this part of the world.

The thrush and its sub-alpine home recently caught a break in the form of a new plan for windmills near Sugarloaf.

The plan would keep turbines off the valuable sub-alpine peaks of the Redington Pond Range. That opened the door to a pro-wind farm rally Wednesday in Portland by a long list of once-divided environmental groups and other organizations. It was called the largest show of support for wind energy in Maine history.

Blueback herring also had a big week.

The slender, silvery herring is one a group of fish, including alewives and Atlantic salmon, that swim from the ocean up Maine rivers to spawn each spring. Or, in the case of some rivers, they used to before dams and pollution kept them away.

The fish have been kept out of the Presumpscot River by dams on and off for 250 years. On Tuesday, after years of fighting in court, the owner of six Presumpscot dams announced an agreement to remove one of the dams, install fish passage at the others and even use traps and trucks to reintroduce the fish to the upper river.

Experts said it won’t take the resilient herring long to find their way back upstream to Westbrook, and eventually beyond. They may even be joined by few stray endangered Atlantic salmon.

Now, it’s true a lot of us won’t ever hear a Bicknell’s thrush sing or watch blueback herring swim up a set of rapids. But what becomes of them is important to a lot of other species, including us. After all, their habitat ultimately is our habitat, too.

Here's our story on the UCS report. Find the report here.

Here's the Kennebec Journal's story about the wind power rally.

And here is our story about the Preumposcot River restoration plan.

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