Acadia: Transplantation

Standing in the woods for an early morning bird survey, the cobwebs clinging to my face are a fairly close match to the cobwebs lingering in my head. I'm functional, yes, but never truly reach full capacity on mornings that require predawn rising. Lately, I've been amassing a sizable collection of beautiful sunrise pictures, which may surprise those who know me, but what else is there to do when confronted, stumbling and half-awake, with a gloriously dawning sky? Certainly not finding suitable words to coherently describe it. No, I pull out the camera to attempt to convey what my brain won't be able to for at least the next several hours.

The car sits by the view form my front door.

 In the last two weeks in Acadia, on Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine – two weeks that, in the way of truly engrossing experiences, feel like much more – there have been several times when words have eluded me, and by no means have all been because of wee early morning cobwebs. Acadia is lovely like few other places. Driving north through Downeast Maine, even on the highway, the smell of salt and tidal mud was in the air, rich with childhood memories. Despite the middle of August, there was and is a faint chill in the wind, maturing to something much more definite when rains or fog seep in, grey and evocative. Low, rocky mountains, their summits scoured by sea wind, stretch slopes clad in boreal spruce over the short distance to meet the Atlantic in a jumble of pink granite shadowed by mist and bleached by sun. 

Ship Harbor.

A spray of herbs at the doorstep.

A 2-legged cairn fogged in at Wonderland.

Lovely indeed.

Belated

The last time I sat down to write it was still midsummer. Every afternoon July heat wrapped the world in humid, sultry haze, but beneath out feet, ripened grass crunched, golden and sere. Summer's first mowing lay scattered around farm fields in rounded yellow bales. Thistleheads that had covered the ground in down resembling the remains of an epic pillow fight turned withered and brown beneath the sun. And then our season was ended. Our sparrows no longer filled the fields with their nesting and singing - most had gone still and silent in the stifling heat, if not vacated altogether from the blazing grasslands - yet still the season felt unfinished. Perhaps it was the speed at which it passed, perhaps it was the dearth of results leading to a spare and sparse cluster of data, perhaps the forever provisional nature of our final weeks' plans, but in many ways the season barely seemed to have gotten off the ground.

Nonetheless, it was done. Awkward goodbyes were said, crews dispersed back to where we came from or where we were headed next. The remaining grassland sparrows, no longer ours, were left to rule their tiny kingdoms in peace. And I drifted on, north to the Frenchman and the cats for a few weeks peace of my own, then on again to start a fall season of banding birds.

~

A season finished incomplete, and the time between moving on and arriving bring, to mind other things as yet unfinished, left behind. Though it's been alluded to several times, what exactly it is I do, and why I'm to be found rambling over and through all sorts of landscape in almost any weather, pestering reluctant, often recalcitrant wildlife, has gone largely unexplained.

So: I am by trade a field biologist, or for those who prefer the more accurate and somewhat more arcane, a biological field technician, educated in wildlife biology but not yet advanced to designing, running, and frequently pulling my hair out over my own projects as full biologists do. What that means in practical terms is doing the on-the-ground work necessary to research, monitor, and manage wild creatures in their own habitat, in the wild. The actual work can take many forms, from perpetually criss-crossing open fields trying to flush nesting grassland sparrows and keeping tabs on the nests they flush from, to netting and tagging migrating butterflies in the gardens and green spaces of a charming seaside tourist town, to bushwhacking through endless miles of northern forest with a backpack, a notebook, and what is essentially a portable loudspeaker, broadcasting the call of some sought-after species, hoping something will answer.

That's just to name a few. There are as many ways to inquire into the lives of wild things as there are wild things to inquire about; more, even. Field work is often seasonal, bound to the schedule of a species or natural occurrence, and over time a typical field tech will rack up quite a roster of places resided and creatures pursued. As to what motivates the endeavor in the first place, though specific goals and questions vary, usually they relate somehow to conservation, the preservation and restoration of the beings and places that are the focus of the work, for the future, and not inconsequentially for their own sake, which to most field biologists and techs alike is just as important as human concerns.

And that, in short, is the what and the why.  And now I will be moving on again to the place I am currently from.