Volunteer Pilots Give Environmental Groups a Boost

Soaring over the northern Maine woods, pilot Rudy Engholm knew what his passenger was about to see. And he wasn’t disappointed.

“Nothing left but pecker pole,” Engholm said as he flew past a brown clear-cut hillside studded with a few forlorn saplings that even woodpeckers might ignore. From the rear seat of the Cessna, forester Alan Calfee snapped photos.

On this sunny August day, Engholm was giving Calfee, a specialist with the National Wildlife Federation, an overall picture of the logging industry in northern Maine. In one afternoon they covered about 1.3 million acres in Engholm’s Cessna 185, a four-person plane with floats on it for a water landing.

It was the kind of flight Engholm makes once or twice a week as president of Northern Wings, a volunteer environmental organization that shows people what Earth looks like from above.

Since 1992, Northern Wings’ pilots--who volunteer their time and the cost of running their planes--have donated about 500 flights to people and organizations that need to see the land in a different way.

Northern Wings calls itself an aviation service for the environmental community in New England and New York State. Engholm notes that the organization, which was formerly a branch of the Philadelphia-based Environmental Air Force, does not take any positions on public policy issues, although its pilots can.

“Pilots flying from Northern Wings come from a whole spectrum of views, political and otherwise,” he said. “I think it’s important as an organization that we be able to work with a wide variety of other environmental organizations.”

On his flights, Engholm carries a large atlas of Maine that he has marked to show which paper companies own what parts of the northern woods and where they have logged. He can tell at a glance from his notations which ponds turn brown from the mud running off the hills when it rains or which streams dry up in the summer because they no longer have trees to shade them.

Seeing the clear-cuts from the air gave Calfee a new perspective on a phenomenon he has been observing at ground level for years.

“The critical thing about getting up in the air is scale,” he said. In the air, “you can look at a 10,000-acre lot and see that 80% of it has been cut in the last 50 years.”

Engholm, 46, is a former computer software executive who moved to Maine six years ago. He always wanted to be a pilot. And he always loved the environment, an appreciation he thinks he acquired when he was growing up in Japan, where his parents were missionaries.

He said he never tires of seeing the land from above.

“There’s something really refreshing and important about looking at the Earth from above, because what you see are not all the political boundaries that we get ourselves so wrapped up in,” Engholm said. “What you see are the ecological features--the rivers, streams, coastlines, islands.”

Most of the missions that Northern Wings pilots fly involve nonprofit environmental organizations and land trusts. The pilots help land stewards and scientists monitor conservation easements, document shoreline erosion, track pollution, take photographs and do other things better accomplished from the air.

Sometimes groups call with unusual requests. Engholm once flew two turkey buzzards from a wildlife center in Shenandoah, Va., to New Haven, Conn.

“We actually had a request to fly a mountain lion from the same route, but we couldn’t find anyone with a door big enough to handle that size cage,” he said.

Another time, a group asked Northern Wings to fly five loggerhead turtles stranded on Cape Cod, Mass., down to Jacksonville, Fla. Engholm could not find a plane big enough to handle the turtles, which weighed about 120 pounds each in their shipping crates. He finally arranged for them to hitch a ride on a Navy anti-submarine warfare plane.

The group’s 50 or so pilots come from a variety of backgrounds. They include an emergency room physician, a retired pilot, a fireman, a junior high school teacher, a Harvard professor, a machine tool operator, a dentist and a newspaper editor.

“They love to fly, they care about this Earth, they are generous enough to donate occasional flights, and they occasionally have the time to do it,” Engholm said. “They’re all individualists--all people who march to their own drum.”

Recently, a pilot took some scientists from the Vermont Nature Conservancy and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service up to a stream in New Brunswick to look for rare dwarf freshwater mussels.

“Our pilot spent the whole weekend in zip waders in the stream, counting mussels too,” Engholm said. “It’s a tremendous opportunity to go interesting places, meet interesting people and do interesting things.”