On a recent mail boat trip to Northeast Harbor, Jennifer Westphal, a resident of Great Cranberry Island said to me, “Hey, you’re a bird watcher aren’t you? I want to tell you about something.” In early May she noticed a lemon yellow bird with a black head, black wings and a black tail. It was perched in the top of a spruce tree and it stayed there while she got her binoculars. It stayed there while she consulted her bird books and looked again. It stayed there while she got her husband Michael to look through his binoculars. They both concluded it was an Audubon’s Oriole, even though, according to the Audubon Web site, the bird has “a very restricted range in the U.S. occurring only in the Rio Grande Valley of southern Texas.” Jennifer was told by a naturalist that it could not be properly identified unless it had been seen by three ornithologists. She was told by her friend, Barb, “I believe you.” Only two weeks earlier, several people on Islesford had spotted an Oregon Junco; a “rare straggler…at feeding trays as far east as the Atlantic seaboard,” according to Roger Tory Peterson’s book: A Field Guide to the Birds.
While no one on our islands is a professional ornithologist, there are plenty of people who watch the birds. We are in a migratory path for songbirds and a natural habitat for shore birds. Our bird feeders are visited by the occasional deer, but our islands are free from squirrels. When someone sees an unusual bird or has a question, they are apt to give Rick Alley a call. He has become a local authority on birds through his 50-plus years of observation. Six of his paintings have won the annual State of Maine duck stamp competition. It was Rick who pointed out that the rosy birds I was hearing and seeing in the tree tops in April were white-winged crossbills. A new bird for me.
In May, as we walked to our cars in the mainland parking lot, Jennifer told me how she started to keep a bird list as an exercise during her recovery from brain surgery in 2003. At first she just wrote down the birds she saw as they came to her feeder. Her friend, Ev Shorey, suggested she could also look through her bird book to recognize and record the birds she had seen before. She finds that her 1947 edition of the Audubon Field Guide, with paintings rather than photographs, is the book she turns to most frequently. Kate Chaplin remembers being 9 years old when she started to keep a bird list during a week spent in Virginia with her Aunt Jeanne. Sarah Corson told me about bird lists kept by her mother, Rosamond Lord. “She tended to make lists of birds and flowers more than lists of `things to do.’ The lists were just for her own interest. Nothing competitive in her personal style of bird lists. Sometimes at the end of May she’d make a list, then in June she’d check off the ones she saw/heard again and add the new ones.” Rick Alley does not usually keep a bird list, but he did one spring when he noticed an unusually large variety of ducks in the marsh. Their migrations had been temporarily stopped by a late winter storm. Karen Smallwood, the most avid bird watcher I know, likes the idea of keeping a list, but she has not started one yet. Until my conversations with Jennifer, it never occurred to me either. From my kitchen window in the last three weeks I’ve seen a pair of cardinals, rose-breasted grosbeaks, evening grosbeaks, a flock of goldfinches, some feisty purple finches, an indigo bunting and a white crowned sparrow; just some of the more colorful birds who accompanied the loyal nuthatches, chickadees and juncoes at the feeder. This time of year is especially conducive to starting a bird list.
This is also the time of year when students spread their wings. The Islesford School year ended on June 11 with a kickball game in the town field and a picnic at the school. Four days earlier, three of these students, Melissa McCormick, Hannah Folsom and Paul Hewes, celebrated their graduation from eighth grade with a potluck supper and a ceremony at the Islesford Neighborhood House.
An island elementary school graduation is a meaningful community event. The Neighborhood House is packed to capacity with family and friends. After the meal, the younger students honor their graduating elders by performing a skit or singing songs. Families of the graduates help teachers put together a slide show of their lives on the island; eliciting laughter and a few tears as the children grow up before our eyes on the bright screen. When the graduates give their speeches, it is the best part of the whole evening. With tremendous pride, we listen as each young teenager tells us what the school and the island community have meant to them. They describe how interactions with the members of their community have helped them get ready to take the next step; and for island graduates the next step is a big one. Going to high school means leaving home and a way of life that is supportive and unique. They are getting ready to leave a nest.
Among the graduation night audience there are former Islesford students who have recently come back for the summer. Some are newly graduated from college or high school, some are on vacation, and a few are between jobs; arriving for just one more summer of home cooking and renewed childhood friendships before they make their way back into the adult world. The fledglings return to parents who are happy to have them home; perhaps unaware that the same happy parents have learned to enjoy an empty nest!
Islesford
June 19, 2007