Another beautiful day…
GoShoals | 11:25 am | July 16, 2009 | Uncategorized
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(Thanks Robin!)
Musings
workinginterns | 7:58 am | July 13, 2009 | Musings
Looking back, I can’t say for sure what I expected from Shoals Marine Laboratory three weeks ago as I threw thirty-two pristinely white pairs of socks into my duffel bag. I heard about the great food and the gulls rampant on the island from a Shoals alumnus, but, coming from suburb in central Maryland, I had no expectations save for a few testimonies and brochure that said I was only allowed two showers a week.
Well, it turns out what I heard was right, but not completely. Great food? Freshman Fifteen: meet the Appledore Eighty. Rampant gulls? Snow White, forget animals that help you clean houses: meet the birds that will peck, dive-bomb, or crap if their chicks are approached. And, believe me, they don’t whistle while you work. Nor when you sleep.
What I didn’t hear about or expect were the people I would meet. It always pleases me to find peers as weird as I am, willing to talk about everything (what are aquacultures? what was it like working at an aquarium in Thailand? do baby gulls have unique calls?) and nothing (who confused cream cheese with butter? that cloud looks like what? you got gull crap where?). Even though the dominant major here is unarguably biology, the students here are surprisingly diverse in their interests: everything from music to marionette-making enters dinner conversation. But we all share a common passion for nature and what the planet’s oceans have to offer us.
As for the faculty: I took the Forensic Science for Wildlife Biologists course, and they were amazing. None of the professors pretended to be authorities on all things forensics-related, but each stuck to their own strengths. They were easy to talk to, always ready with two mouthfuls of previous experience to tell about, knowledgeable but willing to admit when they didn’t know the answer, and extremely entertaining. The result was a Justice League-esque collaboration of faculty. And an education worth two Batmobiles. And Superman’s cape.
My grades do not depend on the previous paragraph.
I can’t write this without mentioning the natural beauty of Appledore Island. When I look out off the porch of Hamilton or Laighton and see the ocean, or take a short walk to Celia Thaxter’s garden and spot three baby gulls cuddled together, or fend off sea sickness by looking out at the horizon, I smile and revel in how gorgeous of a world we have been given.
So right now, as I write this, the sunset bathing the Commons in orange light, a line of gulls silhouetted in the glowing sun, and thirty-one and a half pairs of soiled socks dripping with what I hope is water but smells otherwise, I can’t say that I expect anything more out of Shoals, or that I can think of somewhere else I’d rather be.
-Albert Zhang
Island Archeology
GoShoals | 10:30 am | July 9, 2009 | News
It’s official. Native Americans did inhabit the rocky Isles of Shoals six miles off the Maine and New Hampshire coast. Historians have long assumed that Indians visited and hunted there, but without scientific evidence, no one could say for sure. Read the whole article from SeacoastNH or learn more about the SML Island Archaeology course.
Life on the Rocks: A Tale of Shoals Marine Lab and Other Thoughts and Meditations
workinginterns | 11:04 am | July 4, 2009 | Uncategorized
I’ve been living here on Appledore Island, Maine for over a month now, and I find that there is very little that I miss about the mainland. Being from Kansas City and going to school in Oberlin, Ohio, my decision to come to Shoals was a leap into a foreign, nautical territory. It was as if I was driven by some primal urge to live on the edge of things after living in the middle of things for my entire life—by the sea. The first two weeks of “summer” I adventured around Appledore and the other Isles of Shoals in search of rare migratory birds in Field Ornithology, taught by the wonderfully chill and awesome David Bonter. Having only a vague idea of what birds were before the class, I now carry binoculars with me whenever I leave the island hoping to catch a glimpse of a Northern Gannet plunging into the water for a meal, or a graceful Sooty Shearwater shooting over the updrafts of the waves.
It is amazing how much college changes you. And because Shoals is a cooler, wilder extension of college, I think it is interesting how living on Appledore has changed me. My decision to stay here as a working intern following my class has resulted in a strange concept—free time. Shocking, I know, but having time to reflect has made me contemplate what exactly it means to be a biologist. Or maybe not just a biologist, but a person who cares about what is happening to the Earth. Why don’t more people care about stopping pollution, overfishing, global warming, ocean acidification, etc.? I didn’t even know what the dangers of some of these things were before I came to Shoals.
I remember thinking as a little kid, how cool it was going to be to live in the distant year 2050. I thought by then that the earth would be miraculously cured. Everyone would use renewable power and landfills would be an antiquated idea. I wanted to fast-forward to a future where they have already solved the major problems of the present. Being here has kick-started my desire for sustainability and conservation—something so easy to forget when you are preoccupied with school and work.
Sitting on the rocks on the eastern shore of the island, looking out at the misty blur of the horizon, a mix of grey and blue and purple—I know that there is so much out there to learn. Waves pummel the rocks in the intertidal, the ascophyllum pulsing with each current. The fog obscures the mainland so that you can only see water and rock. Irises and daisies seem to glow in the encroaching twilight. Gulls “yeow” and “kak” in the background of all of this, now so familiar to me and all inhabitants of Appledore, but also so little understood. It struck me that I am sitting in the middle of a wilderness. Not that there is nothing here, there is: shoe trees, caves, cliffs, coves, waves crashing onto Transect 22, amazing people, great food, great music, and nighttime adventures through the mud (!!!).
No, Shoals is not a wilderness—it’s just that everything surrounding me at this moment is wild.
And as cold as it sometimes is, and as foggy as it sometimes is, there is a wild beauty to this place unlike anything I’ve ever known.
–Bud Stracker
Photos from Mitch Walters
GoShoals | 12:32 pm | July 2, 2009 | News,Photos
Mitch Walters from Field Ornithology 2009 sent us links to some beautiful photos he took at SML this spring – here’s a few or you can check out his flickr or his slideshow at national geographic!
