From Juanita Roushdy

Hog Island is Audubon’s “True North,” said David Yarnold, CEO of National Audubon, at the 75^th anniversary celebration on August 20, 2011. In the Audubon camp’s Fish House, David Yarnold’s inspiring and heartfelt words and commitment to Friends of Hog Island and to the island and camp itself, which dates back to 1936, left attendees bubbling like a freshly opened bottle of champagne.

Not only did Mother Nature provide signature Maine sun and bright skies for the event, but also calm seas for an eye-popping tour around the island.  Abundant wildlife including close-up views of Harbor Seals and a mature Bald Eagle, which when it took off caused an outburst of “oohs” and “aahs” among the passengers as if at a 4^th of July fireworks. Nature has a way of eliciting such awe.

Lobsters, clams, corn, potato salad, and fresh blueberry cream puffs by Janii Laberge, the camp’s chef, left everyone sated and looking for an empty hammock or Adirondack chair to relax and enjoy the scenery.

The celebration spilled over into Sunday with a reunion of former alumni and friends. Tom Schaeffer, FOHI board member, started the full day by leading a walk down to Bingham Cottage to see the restoration inside and out.

Then Jay Collier’s presentation about archiving Hog Island’s history moved many to sign up to help with copy-editing documents that had been scanned. A break for lunch was followed by Bruce Poland, lobsterman and co-owner of Bremen Co-Op, talking about the local lobster industry. He had to be rescued from the many eager questioners after the presentation so that he could get back to the traps!

A lively, amicable discussion about the future of FOHI followed against the backdrop of hope and enthusiasm for the new leadership at National Audubon. All were greatly taken by David Yarnold’s address to the 75^th anniversary group on Saturday and felt confident of a promising future for Hog Island.

The day’s presentatons culminated in a moving talk and DVD by Dur Morton. But not to have everyone feeling sad on the last night Sue Schubel organized a rousing game of Bird Jeopardy with three teams: The Wild Turkeys, the Woodcocks, and the Terns. Friendly competition ended with  surprise rally by the Terns. Much laughter prepared us for a restful night’s sleep.

Hog Island Reunion attendees 2011

Over 80 people enjoyed the weekend’s festivities – old Hog Island friends and alumni, neighbors, and new friends; Peggy and Dur Morton, Steve Kress, Mike and Margie Shannon, Mary Alice Knox and her daughter Elaine, Brita and Don Dorn, Susan Clancy, Roz Allen and Paul Landry, and Marilyn Smith to name but a few. New friends, included the NAS staff that wanted to see Hog Island for themselves – Susan Lunden, Anne Brown, Susan Houston, and Susan Ketterlinus. Leigh Altadonna, NAS board member, extended his Chapter Leader participation to include the 75^th anniversary.

Yes, this was, indeed, a memorable 75^th anniversary full of promise for a bright future for an island that has given so much to so many.

By Theresa Willingham — 8/22/2011

Hog Island

This past weekend, Audubon Hog Island Camp, on Muscongus Bay in Maine – one of the most wonderful, successful, and, to our family, personally enriching and warmly memorable, environmental education facilities in America – celebrated its 75th anniversary.

In  the summer of 2007, my middle daughter, then 17, was awarded an Audubon Society Scholarship to a Hog Island residential camp.  Always an outdoorsy child but only cautiously adventurous, Hog Island was her first – and only – “sleep away” camp.  For ten days, she would bunk with other high schoolers from around the country and learn about birds, and local ecology.

Maine woods

For those ten days, the rest of us journeyed around coastal Maine, touring lighthouses, geocaching in fragrant balsam forests, exploring Acadia National Park, and a variety of scenic and historical areas. We fell in love with Maine. Our daughter fell in love with birds. We all fell in love with Hog Island.

Our daughter came back confident, excited, and an avid birder. She started a blog – Earthbird: Diary of a Teenage Birder — which eventually became the diary of a college birder. She wrote an article for the Audubon Society about her experience at Hog Island: Summer Camp Salute , and wrote her college essay about how Hog Island set her on the path to both environmental and self-discovery.  She headed to college with fresh focus, new ideas, and a yen for travel that has since taken her to London, Wales and Ireland for a semester, and to Puerto Rico for service learning projects.

This summer, her final summer before she starts her senior year at Eckerd College, where she’s an Environmental Studies and Anthropology major, she interned at Shaver’s Creek , the nature center of Penn State. Among other things, she worked with the Raptor Center there, coming full circle on her journey from fledgling birder to bird of prey handler.  Midway through the summer, she journeyed to Tuscson, AZ to join 79 other students from around the nation as a Udall Scholar, which recognizes young leaders in environmental fields.

The College Birder

The Teenage Birder

As much as all of this is a tribute to my daughter’s own drive, curiosity and interest in the world around her, it is equally a tribute to the place that set her mind afire in first place. On Hog Island, my daughter walked in the footsteps of some of the nation’s leading environmentalists, scientists and naturalists, including Roger Tory Peterson, Rachel Carson, and Dr. Stephen Kress. Since 1936, campers have experienced the transformative beauty, abundant wildlife and deep serenity of Muscongus Bay under the studied guidance of teachers like Peterson and renowned birder Kenn Kaufman, who turned my daughter’s eyes heavenward.

Environmental education in the classroom is one thing.  Experiencing the living wonders of a place as rich in beauty and biodiversity as Hog Island, and rich, as well,  in the people who understand it and eagerly share its wonders with others, is something else entirely.

Author Scott Weidensaul said of Hog Island, “Hog Island takes hold of you. There are many beautiful places, but this one will change your life.“

Our daughter would probably agree.  I know we certainly do!  Happy Birthday, Hog Island!

Republished with permission

From Juanita Roushdy — 12/23/2010

Christmas and the holidays are almost upon us. Here in Maine, lush greens have turned to shades of gray and dark greens. Our beloved Audubon Camp at Hog Island is wrapped up for the winter – final maintenance projects have been completed, windows are shuttered, floats are in, and water is shut off.

By Juanita Roushdy

We hope you’re in the mood for good news, because we have a lot to share with you!

1. Under innovative leadership from Steve Kress and Project Puffin, the 2010 programming was a huge success. More than 160 adults and teens enjoyed classic programs and new offerings. By all indications and current registration numbers, 2011 promises to be an even bigger success, and two additional sessions, for educators and Audubon chapter leaders, have been added.
2. A flurry of activity in the past three months by FOHI has resulted in its application for 501(c)(3) tax exemption. The action was precipitated by news that National Audubon was in negotiations with Camp Kieve, a private local camp, for imminent transfer of ownership of the Hog Island buildings and peninsula. The good news: National Audubon has deferred its decision in order to give FOHI time to prove that it can provide an endowment and supplemental income for the camp. For articles and background, visit fohi.org, where you’ll see my favorite description of our role in this drama: “FOHI came charging over the hill.”
3. We have located missing camper lists back to 1969 and are busy putting that information into digital format – approximately 5,000 names.
4. National Audubon’s highest recognition, the Golden Egret Award, has just been given to Steve Kress “who by his continuous and consistent effort over the years displays leadership qualities and is an example to other employees of helpful, supportive, caring, and dependable service.” We already knew that! Congratulations, Steve! (His work with Hog Island was singled out for particular mention.)

Hog Island takes hold of you. There are many beautiful places – this one will change your life. – Scott Weidensaul

We hope you share our energy and enthusiasm for this new era in Hog Island’s long and storied history, which marks its 75th year in 2011. FOHI has been pivotal this year and will play a key role in the island’s future. We have a committed board, a vision, mission, and a set of goals to guide us:

Vision: To see the day when, under Audubon ownership, the Audubon Camp at Hog Island is financially self-sustaining with a substantial endowment to assure its future.

Mission: The mission of the Friends of Hog Island is to preserve the legacy and support the conservation, nature programs and activities of the Audubon Camp at Hog Island, Maine.

Goals: The Friends of Hog Island, through openness, social media, technology, and personal contact pledge to:

• Build a sense of community among campers
• Build partnerships with local conservation and environmental groups
• Build upon and further the mission of National Audubon
• Build trust and support within the local community
• Build a stable, financial annual income stream through fund-raising and an endowment
• Build a nationwide volunteer base to work at the camp during sessions
• Build a collection of historical materials to keep alive the conservation legacy of the Audubon Camp at Hog Island for future generations

By doing this, we hope to assure a sustainable future for Hog Island. We believe that all the Friends of Hog Island will generously support the camp in an ongoing, reliable manner, ensuring that National Audubon will continue its ownership of the island and its programming there.

We anticipate approval of our 501(c)(3) status early in the New Year, and will be writing you then to ask for your support to assure a sustainable future for Hog Island.

In the meantime, please visit our website (fohi.org) and provide us with stories and feedback, sign up for email updates, and spread the word of our new direction. And come back to join us! For information about the 2011 programs, visit www.hogisland.audubon.org.

Have a Merry Christmas and a happy holiday season.

From the National Audubon Society

The Golden Egret Award is for a staff member who by his or her continuous and consistent effort over the years displays leadership qualities and is an example to other employees of helpful, supportive, caring, and dependable service.  The candidate must have a minimum of ten years service at Audubon.

Steve Kress

The 2010 Golden Egret Award has been awarded to Steve Kress, Vice President, Bird Conservation, Seabird Restoration, ME

Steve is known by some as “the puffin guy,” others as Audubon’s rock star scientist, and others as that humble but passionate protector of seabirds and a great believer in the power of education.

Steve has had a long and distinguished career with Audubon.  He is internationally known and celebrated and has produced conservation results that are legendary not only in Audubon, but far beyond our borders.  Steve doesn’t just save birds — he’s a passionate educator who inspires and empowers others. Steve, with his 30-plus years of directing the Seabird Restoration Program, continues to demonstrate a record of leadership, team building, and financial ingenuity that is remarkable to all those who work with him.

After starting a small field program on one island, he has now grown the program to include seven Audubon-managed islands, where more than 8,000 pairs of mixed Terns and 1,000 pairs of Puffins nest each summer. Steve is a master of innovation, inventing ways to solve problems that may not have been used before, while building leadership among others who work with him.  For example, since he started his work with puffins and seabirds he has trained more than 500 college students who have served as “seabird island stewards.”  Many of these interns have gone on to successful careers in conservation, cherishing their unique experiences with the “puffin project” and Steve Kress.

Steve is not only a role model for so many of us at Audubon, but is truly an inspiration to anyone who cares about conservation and building the next generation of leaders.

Steve is known to his colleagues as having a wonderful sense of humor, and is thoughtful, wise, and an entrepreneurial leader who continues to create new opportunities that grow and promote the Audubon mission.  Since the late 1980′s more than 75,000 people have participated in this Audubon-sponsored venture.  With every trip, Steve and his team of interpreters inform, inspire, and entertain future conservation constituents who often go on to be Audubon members and supporters.

Steve has written books about birds, bird watching, and gardening for birds and wildlife.  And he’s organized a cadre of highly-motivated volunteers and staff who are currently helping to restore Hog Island programming and operations for new generations.  And the list could go on and on.

Steve is not only a role model for so many of us at Audubon, but is truly an inspiration to anyone who cares about conservation and building the next generation of leaders.

Famed videographer Lang Elliott has produced a new 6-minute video about the ornithology and teen birding session at the Audubon Camp in Maine on Hog Island.

Elliott and co-videographer Martyn Stewart capture the spirit of the legendary camp which will celebrate its 75th anniversary next summer.

The video features well-known birders Kenn Kaufman, Scott Weidensaul, Greg Budney, Sara Morris and Steve Kress. Lang will join the field ornithology instructors for the 2011 Hog Island program.

From Juanita Roushdy, President, Friends of Hog Island

Juanita helps clear debris from Eastern Egg Rock during September service session

Do you remember being at Audubon camp on Hog Island for the first time and hearing a strange word dropped into conversations and introductions – “fowee” “fohigh”. What did it mean? At the end of the session, you realized it was one of those delightful acronyms, which have become part of our lexicon, meaning Friends of Hog Island (FOHI).

Do you remember, too, how when you left you were eager to continue receiving news about an island that held special meaning and made you smile when you thought about it?

Well, we have good news! Friends of Hog Island formally formed in 1998 will shortly become a 501(c)(3) nonprofit group. You will be able to support your beloved island and buildings directly. Friends once again have heeded the call to assure Hog Island’s future.

The recent Road Scholar (formerly Elderhostel) service program at Hog and the subsequent FOHI workweek to close up the camp produced fertile discussion and positive actions. Concerned over the closing of the camp in 2009 owing to lack of funds, the participants and FOHI sought positive solutions and came up with reconstituting FOHI as a 501(c)(3) with the goal of providing an annual supplementary income stream for the camp.

A board is currently being formed with Juanita Roushdy, a FOHI who moved from North Carolina to just up the road from Hog Island, as President; Kenn Kaufman, noted author and Hog Island instructor, Scott Weidensaul, Hog Island instructor, nature writer, and dedicated FOHI; Steve Kress, Director of Project Puffin and the person responsible for the cost-covering programs this year; David Klinger, a former president of FOHI and long-time friend of Hog; Gaye Phillips, another dedicated and long-time FOHI who comes each year from Dallas Texas with her husband, Robert, for the FOHI work weeks.

Now that’s good news! So, here is some more.

Where do FOHI’s get their energy? This is a question asked by many. September 19-24 was the first-ever FOHI workweek to close up the camp, and energy surged.

In 5 days, 16 FOHIs stripped beds, washed linens; vacuumed and swept all buildings; put away furniture; scraped and painted outdoor trim; glazed windows; primed and painted the new rooms in the Crow’s Nest; removed screens on all buildings; put up winter shutters; and completed a myriad other winterizing tasks., including kitchen duties.

But perhaps the most gratifying and most demanding task was removing and cutting up a gargantuan pile of lobster traps and other marine debris from Eastern Egg Rock. Sally Sanderson, a FOHI volunteer, upon seeing the pile on the rocks thought to herself, “there’s no way we’re going to be able to remove all of that in one trip.” Three hours later, 7 FOHIs and Eric and Sue’s Herculean efforts in rowing the trash-laden dory back and forth had cleared the island and left it once again ready for next year’s nesting.

Although we didn’t see a rainbow during the workweek, the good humor and beaming smiles made up for it.

Keep an eye out for more news of FOHI as it moves forward and be part of this wonderful energy that the Audubon Camp at Hog Island nurtures.

Juanita is a full-time resident of Bremen, ME and lives just up the road from Hog Island. She is currently on the board of Audubon North Carolina and founded and was president of the Cape Fear Audubon Society in Wilmington, NC. During her professional career she was Senior Editor and later Director of Community Relations at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C. She’s an active volunteer, birder, and conservationist.

By Tom Schaefer

Whether my bark went down at sea
Whether she met with gales
Whether to isles enchanted She bent her docile sails
By what mystic mooring She is held today
This is the errand of the eye Out upon the Bay.
– Emily Dickinson

Space shuttle Discovery returned to Earth early one morning in August 2005, not where families hoped it would — in the heart of a Florida wetland — but in the safe-enough California desert, among friends. I tried to interest my grandsons in the historic Return to Flight. They were both somewhat interested, the four year-old more so than the one twice his age who seemed more occupied with military aircraft and Star Wars battles.

The Hog Island Audubon Camp is connected to significant threads in American literature, nature study, ornithology, and now, would you believe, space.

I started visiting NASA’s Return to Flight Web site months prior, trying to learn of space shuttle upgrades that showed the learning curve of both aeronautical engineers and human resource people. I downloaded a few images for computer slideshows to be shared with the kids and read what I could understand. In the time waiting for the shuttle launch, we followed the celestial exploits of Martian rovers, the imaging of Jovian moons, close-ups of Saturn’s rings, and the crash landing of an interplanetary probe intent on learning the content of comet dust. All this follows by just a couple years the local and global celebration of the Wright Brothers’ first flight, much of it here in my hometown of Dayton, Ohio, where I heard one of my heroes, John Glenn, say that we needed to work harder in the sciences and in aeronautical research because of, at least in part, what we didn’t yet know of the capability of a hummingbird hovering and pelicans drafting, for great distances, only a wing tip away from saltwater.

All this has to do with connections. Syzygy, if you will. The lining up of celestial bodies, or in this case, the lining up of seemingly unrelated significant events that create a meaningful thread of, well, connections.

One of my first experiences with syzygy tapping me on the shoulder was rooted on Hog Island at the Audubon Camp in Maine twenty-five years ago. At the time I was a junior high English teacher beginning work on a master’s degree who was lucky enough to have the Dayton Audubon Society grant him a scholarship to the Audubon Ecology Camp in Maine, as the operation on Hog Island was called then. It just so happened that I was taking an Emily Dickinson workshop that spring when the scholarship interview and application process was taking place. Somebody in my class mentioned visiting Walt Whitman’s house and I came to think how cool it would be to visit Emily’s place on the way to the camp in Maine. I had developed a great interest in Dickinson during the graduate workshop class and so when the itinerary for my family’s travel from Ohio to Down East was finalized, it included a stop in Amhert, Massachusetts for a short visit to the Dickinson homestead.

Although the stop in Amherst was a bit disappointing at first, having learned while we stood on the front porch that the house was closed to visitors that day — a fact that eluded me in those pre-internet days — walking the grounds and observing the flower beds in that private place the introvert poet knew intimately just over a century prior was quite something. I did not get a look inside Emily’s house on that trip, but I was permitted a peek into her family’s secluded garden. And since I must admit there is much in Dickinson’s poetry I have a hard time understanding, just a peek at her “unfading flowers” was plenty to appreciate. Before the day was out, I dragged my wife and two daughters to the Dickinson burial plot a few blocks away. It was there, in meditation with my 35 mm camera and a couple of rolls of black and white and slide film, that I recorded a series of pictures of the shadows setting across her grave stone that still comprise a favorite collection in my personal portfolio.

But back to syzygy. A couple days following my Dickinson pilgrimage, I found myself on the mainland dock at the end of Keene Neck Road in Bremen, waiting for the launch piloted by a very friendly boatman named Joe, dressed in Audubon khaki, to take me the few hundred yards across the Hockomock Narrows to the Hog Island camp. Perhaps you have a personal appreciation for the beauty of the sea, maybe even for the unique waterscape of Muscongus Bay. This Midwesterner was in sensory overload. The texture of the water, the intensity of that August sky, the freshness of the bay breeze, the diversity of hues in the lobster buoys, the strangeness of cormorants and harbor seals, enhanced to the promise of time to be spent on this bay-bound island.

One of my goals during that two-week session was to conjure what my graduate “project” would be. The interdisciplinary humanities program I was working in was to culminate in the creation of some sort of product to be decided between my academic advisors and me. I was leaning toward literature, but also history. In my coursework up to that time, I found myself researching the history of the conservation movement in the United States. Surely the Hog Island muses would provide me with something juicy to chew on back home that could sustain me through the grueling nine hour project that awaited me. Enter my first appreciation of syzygy.

Within a couple of hours of my Audubon Camp arrival, after prowling around the building complex on island’s northern peninsula before the formal program began, I was stunned to realize the ‘savior’ of the island in the early 1900s was none other than Mabel Loomis Todd, the original editor of the Emily Dickinson poetry. Could it be that my academic pursuit in Ohio was connected to both Amherst and Hog Island on an intellectual and metaphysical thread spanning almost a century and over eight hundred miles? Indeed it had. Four years later I presented a copy of my project, The Epic of Hog: The Todd-Bingham Family and the Establishment of the Audubon Ecology Camp in Maine to camp director Steve Kress in a long-anticipated ceremony in the Fish House on the island.

Since that time I have quietly, and in awe, become an aficionado of personal syzygy. Which brings me back to Discovery’s Return to Flight. As it turns out, no comprehensive record of Hog Island history has been attempted to date. The saga of Audubon’s first nature camp, which was, in reality, its first nature center, as well, has been told piecemeal over the last seventy-plus years. The first definitive piece, published in 1936 in Natural History magazine, was authored by Millicent Todd Bingham, Mabel Todd’s daughter. It was Millicent Bingham who, after her mother’s death in 1935, while searching for a university to create a field research station on Hog Island, found National Audubon’s president John Baker. It just so happened that Baker was looking for a new venture in which teachers and students of nature study would be instructed in the new scientific field of ecology. The Point Breeze Inn on Hog Island was easily converted to the Audubon Camp and the seasonal operation opened the following summer. Along with Roger Tory Peterson, the other ornithology instructor in 1936 was Allan D. Cruickshank.

While Peterson went about other pursuits by the second summer of camp operations, including establishing his famous field guide series, Allan Cruickshank remained on staff until the early 1970s. The tam-wearing Cruickshank, in fact, became an icon in Camp history. He honed his birding skills as a youth, with Peterson, as a member of the Bronx County Bird Club in New York. “Crukie,” as his friends called him, had an uncanny ability to imitate birds. Such a talent would be popular with campers, as was his heralded headstand on the boat’s cabin roof to alert those waiting back at camp that a new bird for the summer had been sighted on the bay on that very expedition. In Audubon’s employ, he worked as a writer, photographer, and film maker while becoming a popular speaker on the Audubon lecture circuit in the 50s and 60s.

So in the spirit of learning more about the long reach of the Hog Island Audubon Camp, I found myself doing a Google search of Cruickshank on another morning last summer while watching Discovery attempt to launch on NASA TV. Just beside those pre-launch images, in another computer window, I learned that Cruickshank published a handful of books, including The Pocket Guide to Birds, Wings in the Wilderness, and 1001 Questions Answered About Birds. Some of his best photographs, a few hanging throughout the Hog Island camp building complex, were also published, including the images in Bird Islands Down East, written by his wife, Helen.

While all of this was relatively interesting on the day America’s shuttle fleet attempted to return to space, Hog Island syzygy surprised me once again. It turns out that Audubon’s own Allan D. Cruickshank single handedly convinced NASA in 1962 to turn over areas of the Kennedy Space Center not used by the space program to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to incorporate the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. Having used those wetlands for bird watching, film making, and photography, Cruickshank convinced NASA, hot into a space race with the Soviet Union, to preserve the unused spaceport buffer zone ecosystem.

By the time the Endangered Species Act of 1973 became law, it was determined that thirteen endangered or threatened species occurred on Merritt Island, now considered one of the most important refuges in the national system. To pay tribute to Cruickshank’s contributions in forming the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, a five mile trail there has been dedicated to his memory.

The Hog Island Audubon Camp, moored mystically “out upon the Bay,” as Dickinson wrote of her metaphorical boat, has proven to be a point of alignment along more than one vector of syzygy. Finding connections to Hog Island tethered in various places, including its mention in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, confirms the impact and reach of the program on the island now run by the Maine Audubon Society. The Hog Island Audubon Camp is connected to significant threads in American literature, nature study, ornithology, and now, would you believe, space. Through Emily Dickinson, to Mabel Loomis Todd, to the Hog Island Audubon Camp, through Allan D. Cruickshank, then on to the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, and finally into Earth orbit. Hog Island syzygy, indeed.

Tom Schaefer is chair of the Hog Island History Project which would appreciate stories of important people, places, or events connected to the Hog Island Audubon Camp. Contact the author for more information.

When I first came to Hog Island as a camper in 1981, I was far enough along on a humanities degree that my next big hurdle was to complete the “project” phase of the program. Since my focus was on conservation history, I figured hanging out on an island in Muscongus Bay for two weeks, as the Audubon Camp program was back then, would provide a wonderful time for a guy from the Midwest to reflect and, I was sure, discover the absolutely right topic for that culminating graduate project. I can remember that I was mildly disappointed when, after having prowled around the camp compound for only a few hours, the project idea jumped up from the island itself and grabbed me. And I never would have guessed that Emily Dickinson would be at the heart of it all. But she was.

Mabel Loomis Todd, celebrated as savior of the island, was also the original editor of Emily Dickinson’s poetry back in the late 1880s.

The idea of attending the Audubon Camp in Maine came from a science teacher colleague who had attended the previous year on a scholarship from the local Audubon chapter. What a great idea, I thought, so I applied as well. I assumed that the Dayton Audubon Society targeted science teachers for their grants, so I held my breath until hearing that they had agreed to partially fund my humanities-based trip. I had also heard at just about that time in a graduate seminar on Dickinson that one of the students had visited Walt Whitman’s house while in Boston. Another great idea, I thought. I could stop by the Dickinson homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, on the way to Hog Island. And I did. But that is another story. Suffice it to say that I had been smitten by Miss Dickinson’s life and work and was pretty excited to be traveling through New England to her home with the coast of Maine as my destination.

So there I found myself on that first Sunday afternoon on Hog Island. I was poking around, investigating camp buildings, but was really drawn to sitting on the rocky outcrop just north of the Fish House overlooking the bay. Although lobster was beyond my teacher’s salary, the look of the bouys dotting the bay was lovely, as was the view of neighboring islands, the sound of a lapping tide on the shore, and the fresh feel of a downeast sea breeze. The long drive from Ohio had already been rewarded. When I got up from where I was sitting, I noticed a sign just behind me giving notice that Hog Island was also called the Todd Wildlife Sanctuary. Something about that name seemed familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. Soon after, while prowling around the Fish House, it hit me. The woman whose picture was framed on the knotty pine wall and celebrated as savior of the island, Mabel Loomis Todd, was the same Mabel Loomis Todd who was the original editor of Emily Dickinson’s poetry back in the late 1880s. Was it possible that my destination in Maine and my pilgrimage to the Dickinson homestead were connected? Indeed, they were.

To be sure, Emily Dickinson knew nothing of Hog Island. Mrs. Todd’s process of purchasing tracks of the island began years after Emily’s death and years after publication of Poems in 1890. Still, it is as clear to me now as was the Muscongus Bay air that Sunday afternoon, that the humanities played a key role in what would become the Audubon Camp in Maine.

With all of the fine natural history instruction and personal recreation that goes on at the Audubon Camp in Maine, it is good to see the humanities getting a share of the spotlight. Mabel, and Emily, I should think, would both be nodding in approval.

“The Epic of Hog”: The Todd-Bingham Family and the Establishment of the Audubon Ecology Camp in Maine is available through inter-library loan from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio.

Tom Schaefer is a retired high school history teacher who completed his masters project on the history of Hog Island. Tom is former FOHI President and Editor of Across the Narrows.