Island Immersion

On Maine's Appledore Island, students learn about birds by living and working among them

By David Bonter

Welcome to Day 1 of the Field Ornithology course on Appledore Island, Maine. No televisions, no cars, no stores. But plenty of gulls. Gulls nesting, gulls fighting, gulls vomiting fish for their young. Gulls employing chemical warfare as they fly over, dropping fecal material on humans to drive them away.

A Great Black-backed Gull takes charge of a ruler used by a student to measure nests.

Mike McLellan

Language teachers often say that full immersion is the best way to learn a foreign tongue. The same holds true for learning about birds, and there is no better place I've seen for teaching and learning about ornithology than on a beautiful, 90-acre rock in the Gulf of Maine.

Appledore Island is home to the Shoals Marine Lab, a field research and teaching campus operated by Cornell University and the University of New Hampshire. Although called a "marine lab," Shoals has a long history of bird study. For example, researchers have conducted in-depth studies of the breeding biology, ecological impact, and behavior of gulls here, and have been investigating the ecology of migrating songbirds at the Appledore Island bird banding station since the 1970s.

I arrived a few days before I began to teach the two-week intensive field ornithology course this June, and I was immediately smitten. The winds brought wave after wave of northbound migrants to the island. With biologist and Appledore veteran and Cornell alumna Sara Morris and her team, I helped band 225 Common Yellowthroats and 118 American Redstarts in just 3 days, along with hundreds of other birds.

Teaching about birds here is a dream. Barn Swallow colonies can be found in or under nearly all of the buildings on the scenic campus. "City gulls" nest in dense colonies around the perimeter of the island and "country gulls" live in more secluded areas around the campus buildings. Students can see dozens of songbird species in the hand at the banding station, and the low, stunted vegetation on the island means no "warbler neck" from straining to see birds in the canopy.

Nine students came from as far away as Texas and California, and many of them had almost no experience with birds. At first, one student mistook a Black-capped Chickadee for a male sparrow. We obviously had some work to do. We started the first day with a census of the gulls in the largest nesting colony on the island, counting and recording the contents of each nest. There is no better way to build class unity than to head into a colony of irritated Herring and Great Black-backed gulls for several hours of censusing.

Besides the sensory overload inherent in traversing a gull colony, the big challenge on Day 1 was trying to get the students to call the birds "gulls" instead of using the improper name, "seagulls" (I failed). But what this group of students lacked in ornithological knowledge, they more than made up for in enthusiasm and energy. Highlights included listening to the heartbeat of a Ruby-throated Hummingbird, finding a nest of a Black Guillemot (rare this far south in Maine), banding birds for the first time, and compiling the daily bird list each evening while one student played a banjo.

Being at Shoals Marine Lab was a thrill not only because of the diversity and accessibility of the birds, but also because of the friendly, professional staff, good food, and excellent facilities. Seabird cruises, trips around the islands to census eiders, and traveling to neighboring islands in search of nesting terns were all possible thanks to the Shoals fleet of boats and their skilled captains.

Even after the course had ended, the students insisted that we meet at Broad Cove at sunrise the next day to complete a bird list for the course. And so we did—compiling a sunrise-banjo-bird list with a crèche of eiders feeding merely yards away and gulls "serenading" all around us. What a fine way to end two weeks of full immersion in the joys of field ornithology.

For more information about the Field Ornithology Course on Appledore Island, visit www.sml.cornell.edu. David Bonter is leader of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Project FeederWatch. He was the instructor for the Shoals Marine Lab Field Ornithology course this summer.

For permission to reprint all or part of this article, please contact Laura Erickson, editor, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY, 14850. Phone: (607) 254-1114. email: lle24@cornell.edu