Birdwatchers won’t be flocking to Hog Island next summer, despite its reputation as an idyllic place to enjoy Muscongus Bay’s wildlife. After 70 years, this celebrated Audubon retreat is closing its summer camp.
The cause is financial, according to Maine Audubon, and the future of the camp, a five-minute boat-ride from the mainland, is uncertain. Hog Island is convenient to Eastern Egg Rock puffin colony, and ornithologists and more casual birders have mingled here for generations.
Hog Island has operated almost continuously since it’s founding in 1936, pausing for World War II. Now the $400,000-per-season operation can’t make ends meet, and Maine Audubon, owner of the camp, has laid off the camp’s three year-round staffers.
Seth Benz, outgoing Hog Island director, said the situation isn’t hopeless, and a Maine Audubon committee will explore future options. “Our model of operation is proving to be obsolete. It needs a new business model,” he said. “In the end, I actually made the recommendation [to suspend all programs for 2009].” He said that Audubon officials are calling a “time out: here we have this gem. How can we create a sustainable future for it?”
Meanwhile, Hog Island seabird educator Sue Schubel and husband, Hog Island boat captain Anthony Liss, are out of a job. As live-in caretakers, they will be permitted to keep their on-shore housing through the school year.
Benz, of Belfast, has operated Hog Island for a decade and is looking for a new job. But he has no regrets: “What fed me there was seeing what a week around the beauty of the Maine coast could do – it’s about the learning.”
A teen birding camp has been highly successful, he said, but the traditional teachers and families that flocked to Hog Island didn’t show up last summer, and August was a bust, with cancelled programs.
Tuition for a week is $1,000, and Benz worked hard to build and maintain scholarships for those unable to afford the rate.
Out of the past 10 summers, six of them required a financial bailout from Audubon, Benz said. The reasons may be complicated but come down to falling enrollment, despite a shift in the 1980s from the traditional two-week stay to week-long programs.
“People’s time has become more precious,” Benz said. “At the same time, many more conservation opportunities are available all across the U.S.”
What will happen to Hog Island is up the air.
Sue Cilley, acting executive director at Maine Audubon, said, “Our goal is to figure out how to use it [Hog Island] in a sustainable way. We’ve been facing declining enrollments for several years. We figured the best thing to do would be to take a time out. It’s had a fabulous history. It’s a very special place. Nobody really wanted to do this, but it was the right thing to do,” she said.
Hog Island is reportedly last of a gaggle of summer birding camps formerly operated around the country by National Audubon. In the past, you could find ornithologists such as Roger Tory Peterson on the Hog Island staff, and naturalist Rachel Carson mentions the island in her environmental wake-up call, Silent Spring.
Steve Kress of Cornell University, a former Hog Island director, is responsible for restoring puffins to Eastern Egg Rock and maintains an office on the mainland opposite the island camp.
Besides birding and ecology lessons for individuals and families, Hog Island offered a convivial social setting where participants shared meals and bathrooms and stayed in dormitories that are comfortable but hardly luxurious.
Bill Hancock, who supervised the island as Maine Audubon environmental centers director, from 1997-2008, said he believes campers’ expectations have changed. “You can go to a remote lodge in South America and have a private bathroom,” he said, but not at Hog Island.
Even so, Hancock said he loves the island and what it has to offer. “It’s a full, enriching experience. They’re not making places like this any more, where people can experience the Maine coast. My hope is the facilities can continue to be used. It would just be a shame to let those buildings go. It’s a beautiful island.”
National Audubon owns the 330-acre island; the camp buildings are the property of Maine Audubon. The Maine affiliate has invested $1 million in upgrades since taking over Hog Island operations from the National group in 2000.
Hog Island was given to the National Audubon Society by author Millicent Todd Bingham of Washington, D.C, who grew up spending summers on the island in a bungalow now fallen into disrepair.
“I could never feel that I owned such a place,” she once wrote. “It seemed, rather, the property of all who cherished it… If only the island could be saved, it would do more for us than we could possibly do for it.”