The Point of Schoodic Point

Here at the point, in Acadia National Park, the new year is green and white: fresh snow on forests of spruce and jack pine. From these quiet woods I hear new ocean waves breaking on 400-million-year-old granite. And on my first full day here yesterday, I enjoyed that quilted sunset sky above from what is essentially my front yard.

For the next few weeks I’ll be encamped near Schoodic Point, mostly to see if the world might stop spinning so fast — and to try making some sense of it all. I’ll do that by walking and writing. My host here in the national park is the Schoodic Institute, a former naval based transformed into a center for research and education. From here at Schoodic, the U.S. Navy once used satellites and a gigantic antenna array to triangulate the location of foreign warships, and to help guide cruise missiles in flight over the horizon.

Common Eider

Imagine that — a military listening site now a place where we listen to nature. If you know me, you know that Schoodic is my kind of point. On this campus, scientists and students study everything from ocean warming to insect diversity. And they do it with a genuine dedication to citizen engagement. (I’ll be giving the Brown Bag lunch lecture — on the new science of migration — here on January 19.) The Schoodic Institute has a kinship with another Down East center for learning, the Eagle Hill Institute, where I teach seminars on dragonflies and damselflies, and on moths and butterflies.

War, of course, is the ultimate environmental and human catastrophe. But as it turns out, the U.S. military, one of the country’s biggest landowners, does show its green stripes from time to time. I’ve been hired to study rare butterflies on National Guard land, for example, and my colleagues at the Vermont Center for Ecostudies are partnering with the Department of Defense to study grassland birds on military sites across the country.

So, from here at Schoodic this month, I’ll be listening more to waves on rock than to the tsunami rocking Washington. And although I’m loving Maine right now, I’ll point with pride to the touching and sensible inaugural address last Thursday from our new Republican governor, Phil Scott, in my home state of Vermont. In Governor Scott we hope the legacies of Vermonters George Aiken and Jim Jeffords survive, like a seed bank of sanity in the shitstorm now blowing through our nation’s capital, our politics and our commons.

Here’s my bird list from Schoodic Point and environs yesterday.

Black Guillemot

• American Black Duck
• Common Eider
• White-winged Scoter
• Black Scoter
• Long-tailed Duck
• Bufflehead
• Red-breasted Merganser
• Common Loon
• Horned Grebe
• Red-necked Grebe
• Great Cormorant
• Northern Harrier
• Bald Eagle
• Purple Sandpiper
• Black Guillemot
• Herring Gull
• Great Black-backed Gull
• Northern Flicker (rare here in January)
• American Crow
• Golden-crowned Kinglet