Cobscook Bay is one of Maine’s special places, with huge tides averaging 28 feet and sometimes surging to 30 feet, cold nutrient rich waters, a convoluted and largely undeveloped shoreline, and vast intertidal areas that provide habitat for a wide array of species. Bald eagles abound, waterfowl find refuge, and shorebirds feed here, while the bay’s waters support a rich and diverse food web that includes commercially important species such as clams and scallops, little known species like hydroid and ribbon worms, and creatures still unknown. The tide is central to Cobscook’s natural processes, and twice a day enough water to fill a third of the bay’s volume floods in and then ebbs out again, roughly the same volume of water that flows out of the mouth of the Mississippi River during the same time period. The incoming tide carries nutrients from the deep waters of the Gulf of Maine that provide the foundation for the bay’s food web, while freshwater entering from three small rivers equals only about 1 percent of this volume. How this salt water circulates within the bay determines what, where, and how well things grow, as well as what gets flushed out on the receding tide. For thousands of years people have inhabited Cobscook’s shores and used its abundant natural resources to sustain themselves. Compared to other estuaries in the eastern United States, Cobscook has suffered relatively little degradation by fishery development. Today about 7000 people reside in the nine communities around the bay: one city, five towns, two unorganized townships, and one Native American tribe reservation. These communities are actively engaged in the challenge of integrating conservation of this remarkably productive natural resource with development of a healthy local economy. When Washington County clam harvests plummeted by 1984, local residents became concerned, and people living in communities bordering Cobscook Bay worked to increase the productivity of the bay’s clam flats by reseeding the flats with juvenile clams and cleaning up pollution. Over 2000 acres previously closed to harvest were opened in the late 1990s.