"What we're trying to create here is a scrub-shrub wetland," Katelin Nickerson told Maine Public last month, standing in the field next to the Smith Preserve parking lot. "So, it's hopefully going to be kind of like a tangled, messy-looking shrubby wetland that provides really good cover for a lot of different kind of birds and other species."
If you've pulled into the lot at 76 Guinea Road since late October, you've seen the start of it. The hayfield between the parking area and the Batson River is now mulched with straw and dotted with about 2,400 young native plants. It doesn't look finished, and it isn't supposed to. People drained this ground generations ago. The money to undo that came from wetland losses somewhere else in Maine, and the sign that the project worked will be a thicket nobody can walk into for several years.
The hayfield was a detour
The Kennebunkport Conservation Trust says the 13-acre hayfield was a freshwater wetland before it was farmed. People cut ditches and drained it to make it workable ground. In the trust's own explainer, property steward Juliann Lapierre puts it plainly: nobody knows exactly what the land looked like before the ditching, "we do know that the area held water!"
When the Portland Press Herald covered the funding in January 2025, it said the restoration would cover 9 acres of former agricultural field inside the roughly 1,200-acre Edwin L. Smith Preserve. UNE professor Pam Morgan called it "the back portion of the hayfields." So the work covers most of the field, not every corner of it.
Location is what makes this field worth the effort. The preserve abuts the Batson River, and KCT says the restored wetland will drain into it. Morgan told the Press Herald that restoring it "will help mitigate the effects of the Batson River's flooding during heavy rain events," which she expects to become more frequent and severe. A wet field slows and holds stormwater, so less of it rushes downstream.
Who paid for it
The project is paid for through Maine's In-Lieu Fee program, which the Maine Department of Environmental Protection and The Nature Conservancy started in 2007. KCT's explainer describes how it works. When a developer or anyone else needs to impact a wetland, they can pay a fee to the state instead of building or restoring a wetland themselves. That money goes into the Maine Natural Resource Conservation Program, whose experts then look for the best places in Maine to restore wetlands.
MNRCP picked this hayfield. Its 2024 allocations memo lists "Smith Preserve Wetland Restoration," sponsored by the Kennebunkport Conservation Trust, at $464,125 in the program's sixteenth funding round, approved in December 2024. Maine Public reports the program has paid for restoration at nearly 200 sites around the state since 2008.
So the wetland coming back on Guinea Road is partly payment for wetland lost elsewhere in Maine. Maine has lost about 20 percent of its freshwater wetlands since the late 1700s, mostly to agriculture, development and forestry. This hayfield was one of those losses. Now it's one of the places the state is choosing to restore.
The earthwork plan behind the plantings
According to the Press Herald, Flycatcher LLC, the land-use consultants who plan the restoration and oversee the sitework, laid out a plan to reconnect the old ditches, check whether buried tile drains were under the field, manage invasive plants, and build what restoration ecologists call pit-and-mound microtopography to restore the field's hydrology. A hayfield is graded flat so machines can cut it. Pits and mounds give the ground uneven high and low spots again.
Planting came next. KCT staff, Flycatcher, University of New England students and community volunteers planted from Wednesday, October 21, through Friday, October 23. Morgan told The Local News the holes had been dug ahead of time so the work would go quickly. By the end of the week, Maine Public reported, volunteers "from retirees to schoolchildren" had planted roughly 2,400 native plants and were spreading straw over them.
The trust has named some of what's going in and what should fill in over time:
- Winterberry and willow, the woody shrubs that make up the "scrub-shrub" part of the wetland
- Spotted Joe Pye weed and swamp milkweed, flowering plants that like wet soil
- Sedges, the grass-like plants found in most wet ground
- An emergent wetland zone mixed in with the scrub-shrub habitat
Fall timing was deliberate too. KCT outreach manager Ashley Poirier told Maine Public the idea is to get plants in the ground now so their roots can take hold before winter.
Who the mess is for
Nickerson called the thicket "messy" because that's what the target wildlife needs. Dense, tangled shrubs over wet ground give cover to species whose numbers in Maine have been falling. KCT's list of species the habitat could bring back reads like a field guide to animals you rarely see in a mowed field:
Spotted and Blanding's turtles, various dragonflies, Northern cottontail, spring peepers & Northern leopard frogs, Ospreys, Great blue herons, Bitterns, Northern harrier, various warblers and wrens, American woodcock, and even Ruby-throated hummingbirds!
The turtles were a reason for the project before anything was planted. In the 2025 Press Herald story, KCT executive director Tom Bradbury mentioned habitat for rare turtles "that have been observed in the area." He also listed carbon stored in the soil and a new site for the trust's education programs among the expected benefits. Morgan said UNE students in several courses, along with summer interns, will help with monitoring.
The calendar from here
Based on what KCT and its partners have said publicly, the field should change on this rough schedule:
- This winter: the fall plantings put down roots under their straw mulch.
- Spring 2027: crews plan to "come back next spring, plant even more," according to Poirier.
- Three to five years out: shrubs and trees reach full size, and Poirier told Maine Public, "We'll have a path to walk through, so everyone will be able to come visit." KCT's explainer also says a new trail will lead through the restored wetland.
- Through the first five years: KCT monitors the site and plans to share what it finds as wildlife moves in.
The trust warns that "it will take years for the wetland to settle in and live up to its full potential." On a short walk, the best progress markers are probably the ones you'll hear before you see, like spring peepers in the low spots or a woodcock over the field at dusk.
Walking past it this winter
The rest of the preserve works the way it always has. KCT's 2026 pocket map says its trails are open year-round but may close for wet weather or erosion. Dogs must be leashed or under voice command, and owners must pick up after them. The Smith Preserve page lists mountain biking, cross-country skiing and snowshoeing among its uses.
KCT allows hunting on its properties except James Wood. Hunters must register with the trust and can't hunt within 100 feet of a trail or 300 feet of a building, or shoot toward either. The trust asks trail users to wear blaze orange during hunting season, so an orange hat or vest belongs in the car for a November walk on Guinea Road.
The new plantings are small and have been in the ground for about three weeks, under straw that's there to protect them. The path the trust has promised comes once the shrubs grow up. Until then, the field is best watched from the edge of the parking lot.
I'm Shanna Jadooram, and I like knowing what's changing in Kennebunkport from one month to the next. That includes a hayfield on Guinea Road slowly turning back into wetland. If you're curious how projects like this connect to the land around them, or you just want to talk about life near the Batson River, reach out to Shanna Jadooram. Let's Connect.
