Islands in our lives
By W. H. Drury Professor of Ecology/Natural History John Anderson
Islands and “islandness” have been a part of College of the Atlantic since its founding. Our heartland is located on Mount Desert Island, and an early recruitment poster included the 1968 Apollo “Earthrise” photograph, the first to show our planet as an island in a sea of space. Our commitment to islands runs deep. In a founding legend, former COA president Steve Katona loaded the entire college community onto a Coast Guard barge for a day trip to Mount Desert Rock. Out of that trip came our involvement with “The Rock.” Bill Drury directed teams of students in clearing the gulls off Petit Manan and working with agencies to establish tern colonies along the Maine coast. Graduates of this initiative and The Rock went on to work for the National Audubon Society and to lead trips to South Georgia, the Falklands, and Spitsbergen.
In 1998, the college acquired titles to the Mount Desert Rock and Great Duck Island light stations through the Maine Lights Program, which allowed the Coast Guard to transfer their lighthouses to other federal and state agencies or to educational institutions. Given our history of working on The Rock and Great Duck (Peter Wayne ’83 and Dave Folger ’81 had done the original ecological inventory for Great Duck in 1985), it made sense for us to accept the stations. In the case of The Rock, this meant the entire island. On Great Duck, we received title to the 12 acres occupied by the station, and subsequently negotiated agreements with the Nature Conservancy and the State of Maine for access to their portions of the island, to use for teaching and research.
During the early days on The Rock, the focus of work was photographic identification of whales using small, rigid-hull inflatables. This provided students with excellent hands-on training that put them in good stead when they went on to entertain tourists or conduct research on the Arctic and Antarctic ice shelves. Artist Harriet Corbett directed operations, and her fearless dog, Toby, ensured that no gulls or seals ventured on shore. By the time the college had acquired The Rock, the whales had mostly moved too far east to be photographed from inflatables, and Harriet and Toby were gone. In their absence, gulls, eiders and a growing population of seals moved in, providing subjects for artistic, literary, and scientific study.
Gulls were also a major focus on Great Duck, home to one of the oldest—if not the oldest—gull colonies on the Eastern Seaboard. Students have banded, weighed, and measured several thousand gulls over the course of the 23-year operation of what is now the Alice Eno Field Research Station. Senior projects and master’s theses have examined the effects of snowshoe hares on the island’s vegetation, nest site selection in guillemots, predation—or the absence of—on eider chicks, and the impact of bald eagles on nesting gulls. At the start of our occupancy, only around 100 pairs of gulls nested around the station, and by 2021 this number had risen to over 700, while gulls at the northern end of the island, more easily accessible to eagles, had declined precipitously. In addition, successive generations of “Ducklings” (students who have worked on Great Duck) have mapped and examined the distribution of Leach’s storm petrels, and a partnership with the Intel Research lab has allowed us to monitor temperature and humidity within petrel burrows.
Even the most optimistic models of sea level rise suggest that our time on The Rock may be short—by 2050, the sea will likely close over the island. However, our continued presence on Great Duck ensures that future generations of COA students will continue to have an island in their lives.
