Nature Camp for Adults

Remember last summer? How you felt too hot to move, let alone think? Too limp to socialize or embark upon great new enterprises?

This year try a cool two weeks in Maine while bringing yourself up to date ecologically. Cool can mean 55-degree nights and 80-degree days.

The Audubon Ecology Camp on Hog Island in Lincoln County is still the innovative place it was 50 years ago when it opened. The “bird” people still run it, but birds are just a beginning. You will experience two weeks crammed with such a variety of learning and fun that you’ll scarcely have time to write a post card.

You will learn how to band birds, identify wild plants as if by magic, forecast the weather, name the clouds, find your way with compass and topographical map, cook with herbs, make algae pictures good enough to frame and navigate the tricky sand bars of Muscongus Bay.

Squire’s Island

You’ll square-dance, hike all alone in a mature spruce forest and sail to deserted lighthouses and bird rookeries. You’ll visit with the squire who owns not only a pristine Irish cottage and an Andrew Wyeth painting to hang in it, but a whole island open to those with the Audubon entree.

At night you’ll slip off the pier with your fellow Polar Club members to swim--briefly--in luminescent water or skulk about in the dark to meet porcupine marauders eye-to-eye or a great white heron night fishing.

At one time, my nature interests weren’t much more sophisticated than counting birds in the bird bath and picking up shells with oohs and ahs. With grandchildren sizing me up, I thought it time to learn a bit more about nature. My husband said no thanks, after learning that the island had no golf course. It had been a long time since my happy days at Y camp and I wondered if I dared.

My 50 fellow campers, ranging in age from 20 to 80, reassured me. There was a New Yorker who’d never gone to camp and envied her children who had, a successful surgeon coming up for air, an Outward Bound sailing instructor, two shy forest rangers from Burma and a retired couple fresh from a cross-country bike trek. And the Greenwich Village plumber who arrived in his own yacht.

We had widows and singles and couples, all claiming to prefer learning vacations and simple living. They turned out to be open to friendship, cheerful, curious and, all but one, nonsmokers.

Introductory Greetings

As we arrived at the pier we were greeted by most of the staff. They presented us with starfish and kelp and slimy pink sea cucumbers to give us an idea what we were getting into. The cooks and teaching staff helped carry our luggage and I was glad that my winnowing had produced just two small carry-on bags.

The camp is half a dozen buildings from the turn of the century, a wash house and volleyball court on 330 acres of granite coast, sandy beach and trails through the wild interior.

This sanctuary was our classroom. I roomed with 15 women in an old ship’s chandlery, two to each small cubicle. We even had hot showers, a luxury I hadn’t expected. We had a living room and a balcony so insomniacs could read late or rise early to search out harbor seals, mark the 10-foot tides or watch the sun rise over a fishing fleet.

We met for wholesome meals, strong on local vegetables, fish and fresh fruit, in a restored 19th-Century farmhouse. At breakfast the day’s schedule for our smaller study groups would be announced. A staff member headed each table and moving about was encouraged. The last one seated had to go for seconds and clear the table, so attendance was prompt. Other meals might take place aboard the Osprey III or in Hummingbird Garden or down by the beach.

Off to Early Start

We quickly got used to the 6:30 a.m. rising bell and the regimen of morning and afternoon classes. We investigated rocky intertidal communities, went on birding treks, mucked in the mud flats, seined for baby sand shrimp and plankton and caught, cooked and ate periwinkles.

We spent a day exploring a private beach at one of the northernmost coastal sand dune systems in America. We canoed through marshes that led to a lake with a Tarzan swing out over the water. All in all, it was 50 hours of field experience and 20 hours of classroom lectures, not counting mini-lectures and evening programs.

Our dedicated teachers included marine biologists, wildlife managers, botanists, master gardeners, nature writers and artists and ornithologists. We had a lot of questions for the visiting naturalists from the arctic tern and puffin reestablishment projects.

Encouraging terns and puffins to nest on Matinicus Rock and Eastern Egg Rock at the far reaches of Muscongus Bay requires dedication, pioneer spirit and tolerance for lonely weeks on barren islands.

Adjusting the Balance

Puffin and tern colonies have been so depleted as the result of the population increases of herring and great black-backed gulls feeding at man’s garbage dumps, that puffins have had to be imported from Newfoundland, gulls have had to be poisoned and rank island vegetation burned over to encourage hatchling survival.

The puffin, whom the Indians called Little Brother for his comic and gregarious ways, is making a comeback. At a cookout honoring two of these naturalists their 2-year-old son pointed up and said, “Cormorants.” Sure enough, three double-crested cormorants were scudding by. This grandmother was impressed.

Hog Island naturalists are gentle people who never seem to become jaded. My first sightings of an osprey chick and an American bald eagle were greeted with enthusiasm.

When a warbler was rescued too late from a hawk attack, a mini-lecture was called after supper. The bird was carefully skinned and we saw the extra fat it had stored for the long migration south. We grasped the wonder of birds, some weighing little more than a dime, that make such epic journeys.

Nature’s Puzzle

Our deep-water dredgings of the bay were part of a survey going back more than 40 years. We came to respect the scientific process: painstakingly gathered data, little pieces of nature’s puzzle aimed at the big questions. We learned that lichen studies from the 1890s are being used to measure changes man has brought to the natural world.

The laboratory is open 24 hours, and any camper may use the microscopes, the books, the large aquariums. He may study the feathers of a swan’s breast, leaf through the pressed algae scrapbooks from 1880 and handle the stuffed birds, the skulls, the rocks and shells.

Fish House contains the library with a telescope, hot coffee and yesterdays’ newspapers. Its rustic walls are lined with pictures of Hog Island notables, including Mabel Loomis Todd who saved the island from being leveled for lumber by buying it in 1908.

By then her lover, Austin Dickinson, was dead and her efforts to publish the poems of his sister, Emily Dickinson, had succeeded. Hog Island must have seemed a refuge from the scandal and gossip of Amherst.

Certainly it seemed a haven to us as we returned from our afternoon-off trip to L. L. Bean’s and the laundromat. We had grown unaccustomed to traffic, designer shops and McDonald’s. Next time we’d stay on the island where we belonged. After all, Hog Island has a perfectly good shop, open after meals. Hadn’t everyone begun to blossom in T-shirts and sweatshirts heralding their love for puffins and loons?

Monhegan’s Cliffs

The next week we were off again 16 miles to sea in search of seascapes and souvenirs on famed Monhegan Island, which boasts the highest cliffs on the U.S. Atlantic Coast at 200 feet.

The lighthouse museum of island flora and fauna and artifacts of the people who have chosen to live in such a remote place is a gem. Beautifully and imaginatively arranged, it is as if the keeper and his family had just stepped out for a moment.

What did I learn worth telling my grandchildren? Well, that there are 319 kinds of hummingbirds and that some fly upside down as well as sideways and backward. Birds have hollow bones to conserve weight and air sacs that help them detect weather changes more quickly than the weatherman’s computers.

Life on an island is better with no telephones, cars or TVs. At night on Hog Island you can watch meteor showers and hear the rush of wings as thousands of migrating birds find their way by ancient stars. Studying nature is life-affirming. Get outdoors and see for yourself.

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For more information, write to Audubon Camps, Environment Education Center, 613 Riverville Road, Greenwich, Conn. 06831.

The cost is $695 for a two-week ecology course, $495 for a one-week ornithology course, $550 for a mid-June Youth Camp for ages 10 through 15.

College credit can be obtained through the University of Maine.

Bring three sets of casual clothing, flashlight, binoculars, magnifying glass, windbreaker, rain gear, swimsuit, sweater. Be sure your footwear grips decks, climbs mountains, mucks in mud and dries out quickly. And include a sleeping bag if you want to sleep out under the stars.

By car it’s an eight-hour trip from New York City, plus time to visit L. L. Bean’s in Freeport, Me. Parking is provided at the camp’s mainland pier.

Several airlines fly to Portland. A 1 1/2-hour limousine ride from there to Damariscotta costs $20. Greyhound Bus also picks up at the airport, but not frequently.

By bus it’s a four-hour Greyhound trip from Boston. A camp van meets the morning bus.

If you take the afternoon bus, plan to spend the night in Damariscotta at the Yellow House Bed and Breakfast (about $35), P.O. Box 732; telephone (207) 563-1388. Or let Bed and Breakfast Downeast find you a place: Box 547, Eastbrook, Me. 04634; phone (207) 565-3517.