The children gather around a large, blank map of Hog Island on the floor, excitedly awaiting the chance to draw in their recent discoveries. At the Family Camp, one of the Maine Audubon Society’s summer programs on Hog Island, Maine, the children and their parents have just returned from a full morning’s exploration of a peninsula of the island. Since their arrival fewer than 24 hours ago, they have already seen four loons, a bald eagle, two harbor seals, an osprey and some blue herons. They have also discovered piles of shells left behind long ago by Native Americans who ate the snails within, mushrooms, and many varieties of moss. These “explorers” aim to fill in the map of this unknown land with their illustrations by the time they finish their five days on the island, and to completely know the land.
The Family Camp participants, however, are not the first to walk or to chart Hog Island. Until the arrival of Europeans in 1605, the island served as a fishing ground for Native Americans. From that time forward, the Hog Island forests were harvested and sometimes converted to pasture land. While boating in 1908, two strangers to the area, Mabel Loomis Todd and her husband, David Todd, horrified at the deforestation that was taking place on the island, bought it in order to preserve it. Following Mrs. Todd’s death in 1933, her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, contacted the director of the National Audubon Society in the interest of beginning nature-study programs on the island. When he immediately took a liking to the idea, the partnership began.
The first camp took place in 1936, and its mission was to help teachers understand the techniques for teaching about nature. For the next 50 years, Audubon offered two-week sessions on different themes, such as natural history, birding and marine life, but always centered on nature education. In addition to the primary theme, Director Seth Benz acknowledges, “we’re really looking at the human relationship with nature … and we’re getting people together from many different parts of the country.”
In 1984, Audubon introduced a summer Youth Camp to instill devotion to nature and conservation in each new generation. The Family Camp is the newest addition, now in its sixth year of existence. Families come from all over, some with veteran naturalists, and others who have never before seen some of the birds that residents of the Maine coast take for granted. Dan Mackay of Albany, New York, a parent at the camp, explained that for him, “one of the best things about Hog Island is that it’s kind of timeless. I think there’s also something unique about being on an island. I think that a lot of people who come here are on an island for the first time – that’s one of the excitements about being here, certainly for younger kids … it’s a special place.” Five minutes off the Bremen shore, Hog Island is accessible to all who have boats or call the camp for a ride over.
In the future, Benz hopes to continue exploring different types of summer programs and to expand into the fall and spring. He believes that “this idea of nature study or nature education is as necessary now as it ever was, as our human population is increasing and we’re really putting a lot of stress on our so-called natural resources. The need to understand our relationship with nature is as great as it’s ever been, and that will never go away, and so we need to pass that on to younger people.”
Even in their short stay on the island, the members of Family Camp have already begun to embrace Benz’s message each time they launch one of their excursions and seek to learn more about the environment that surrounds them. By the end of their time on the island, Hog Island will feel like home – no longer terra incognita.