Penobscot Bay Stewards

Post by Oakley Jackson

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This past Tuesday (May 26, 2015) the Penobscot Bay Stewards joined us for a sunny tour of Hurricane Island. This was the Steward's third annual visit to the island and we were happy to see many new faces along with a few familiar ones. The author of The Town That Disappeared, Eleanor Motley Richardson, accompanied the group and led a highly informative history hike on the granite-quarrying boom that took place on Hurricane between 1875 and 1914.  Although I have read up on Hurricane’s history and often deliver a similar tour to students, I was thrilled to learn several new interesting facts from Eleanor.  I now have several more ghost stories to tell around the campfire, including a tale of two people drowning on the ledge off of the main pier in a thick fog. They could be heard yelling for help, but no one was able to rescue them. 

I also learned that Hurricane and the surrounding islands were part of a microcontinent that collided with the mainland during the Paleozoic era. This fact adds to the unique lure of the islands and the drifting continent is made more mystical by the fact that it was named Avalonia. The Stewards were all intrigued to learn about the island’s colorful history as well as our current use of Hurricane as the setting for bringing together vibrant communities of teachers and learners. We look forward to welcoming back the Stewards next year and are hopeful that some of them will visit before then.  

Cambridge School of Weston 2015

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After towing around a fine-mesh net to collect plankton, students spent time looking into their microscopes trying to identify the critters wiggling around in their petri dishes. 

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Learning about what it takes to be a lobsterman from Jason Day

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Marilyn works with students in the intertidal between Hurricane and Two Bush Island to make sure their methods are supporting their driving question

For the second year in a row (read about last year's program here), the Cambridge School of Weston came out to Hurricane Island during the lowest tide cycle of May. Seven students and two staff joined the Hurricane community, conducting independent intertidal projects as well as two group projects focused on the quarry and on identifying marine zooplankton.

Students arrived on the island with lots of ideas for their independent projects, and after the first few days exploring Hurricane's rocky intertidal environment, they worked to modify their ideas into testable questions. 

Their projects ranged from observing parental care of dog whelks over their egg patches, to determining whether different species of hermit crabs preferred to be more or less roomy in their shell, to quantifying the range of shell colors in smooth periwinkles and whether that impacted the type of brown algae they were most often associated with. 

Low tide doesn't always wait for breakfast, so students had a few early days, heading out to their study sites by 6:30am! Doing field work in the intertidal can also be challenging because there is just about an hour-long window of time to gain access to your study site before the next low-tide cycle. This meant students had to have all of their scientific gear organized, and a clear plan for their sampling strategy in order to collect the data they needed each day.

Another goal of this program was for students to learn about some of the fisheries that are core to Maine's identity. We travelled out on Vinalhaven fisherman Jason Day's lobster boat to see him haul his traps, learn about the regulations in the industry, and get a sense of the ratio of lobsters that are thrown back to 'keepers.' We also spent time talking about Maine's scallop fishery with Cait Cleaver, our director of science and research. Cait shared about the research she is coordinating to look at the effectiveness of small-scale closures in managing the scallop fishery. After learning about her project, we all helped her build spat bags, which she will deploy in the fall to collect larval scallops. If larval scallops are found in or around the closed area, these data can help Cait get a sense of whether new scallops are settling in the area.

It was a pleasuring hosting this group and I am always impressed by the observations and creative questions that students generate when they have a chance to be immersed in field work! We look forward to seeing the finished reports of the projects, and for next year's group to build on the great ideas and questions from this program!

Be sure to check out the CSW blog about their experience for more photos!

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Students enjoy a great view of the sun setting across the bay

Gould Academy visits Hurricane

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A group of Gould Academy sophomores joined us for three days on Hurricane for a mixture of fun and adventurous activities. This was a particularly international group of students and we enjoyed hearing multiple languages spoken on the island!

The first afternoon they worked together to do a beach clean up along Hurricane’s Western shoreline. They picked up over 350 pieces of trash! The next day was a combination of service projects, leadership initiatives, and rock climbing. They were our first group to scramble up our climbing walls this year. The evening was topped off with a view of the sunset up at sunset rock followed by a campfire complete with marshmallows.

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On their last day they learned about the quarry town that used to reside on Hurricane nearly a century ago. They also learned about Maine’s lobster industry and got a chance to haul a few of our lobster traps off of Hurricane’s shore.

It wouldn’t be a Gould trip without a lot of swimming. Students jumped into the frigid ocean every day, for many it was their first time swimming in the Atlantic. This was our second year hosting Gould on Hurricane, we hope to welcome them back again next year! 

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Cold water doesn't scare these kids!

2015 Garden Update

April showers bring gardens to life on Hurricane!

This month marks our third year of growing food for the Center For Science and Leadership. Returning visitors and students will see both similarities and differences in our gardens from previous years.  

We are excited to be growing in straw bales for the second year in a row! Last year we had a blast experimenting with straw bale gardening and we especially loved using them as a teaching tool for our students. They provide a great lesson in compost and circular agricultural techniques, and have allowed us to grow a lot of food on Hurricane’s stubborn granite bedrock. This year we were able to get bales that have already started to decompose a bit from sitting out in a field all spring at Spear Farm and Greenhouse and in Warren, Maine. I’m interested to see how they play host to our vegetables compared to the bales that we used last year.

As I write this I am in the middle of the two-week process of conditioning the bales. Every day I soak the bales through with water (from our conveniently placed fire hose). Every other day I put a half-cup of fertilizer that is high in nitrogen on top of the bales, and continue to soak them through. This process gets the bales “cooking”, by breaking down the straw to start the decomposing process. In about a week they will start to smell sweet and hold moisture really well, and in two weeks they will be ready for planting!

The flower garden has Day Lilies, Sweet William, Echinacea, Bee Balm, and a beautiful Bleeding Heart coming up again this year. We planted Marigolds, Snap Dragons, Calendula, and two high bush blueberry plants in the flower garden, all in the hopes of inviting pollinators to this area of the island. The flower garden is one of my favorite spots on Hurricane. I love seeing bright colorful flowers peak over the old foundation wall that was once the bowling alley during the quarrying era. It’s a joy to see nature reclaim Hurricane’s old historical sites. 

Our volunteer Betsy Rich planted our flower, cucumber, and zucchini seedlings. These are happily sitting in front of the big windows in the mess hall catching as much solar heat as possible. We have also placed our two cold frames over the herbs in the herb garden since they are the most exposed to wind and cold ocean air down by the waterfront.

A big addition to our gardens this year is the expansion of the meadow garden. The students from our Botany program last year helped us turn the second half of the garden over and we covered it with tarp to kill off the weeds and grass. During a very productive volunteer day this past April we had three people help turn the whole garden over and start to form and rake beds. I decided to layer straw over the walking paths in hopes of suppressing weeds, fingers crossed it helps! We planted carrots, peas, kale, spinach, and head lettuces, the perennial rhubarb is as enthusiastic as ever, and the peony looks like it will bloom again this year!

For now we are playing the waiting game for all of our seeds to pop of out of the soil. Stay tuned for more garden updates!​

Volunteer Day: April 25

We kicked off our volunteer days on Hurricane Island for 2015 with a particularly early one, on Saturday April 25. The fact that our winter had been so long and snowy made it seem even earlier than it would on any other year. And as we walked the trails, getting reacquainted with the island we know and love, we did find many banks of snow remaining on Hurricane, and not only in the deep woods.

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Fourteen volunteers, ages 7 to 85, joined seven staffers on Hurricane on this chilly morning, and we could actually see a few snowflakes in the air before we boarded M/V Equinox in Rockland, along with 18 bales for this year’s straw bale gardens just up from the Dining Hall. We had volunteers that had lived on Hurricane for years, and we had volunteers who had never set foot on Hurricane, but everyone was perfectly prepared for whatever mother nature delivered, and she delivered us a day perfect for the projects we had planned.

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We didn’t have our floats in at the dock yet, so it was up the ladder at the dock for this group. The difference between getting to Hurricane so early in the season compared with, say, October, is so palpable, yet hard to define. Sure, the light is a little different in May with the solstice less than two months away, the vegetation is different, but if you kept constant all those little details—took the same number of people, chose a chilly October day with gray skies like this late April day, there is a psychic quality to the island that makes it just feel different. It’s as if the island itself has been hibernating, like the echoes of an entire season of students and visitors that are so fresh in October, so vibrant and ringing, have long faded away to winter’s quiet, contemplative state. There’s a hush to the island, and everyone senses that, so that we find ourselves almost tiptoeing and whispering.

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We started our volunteer day out right: with a coffee break! and then mustered in the barn to hear about the day’s projects: oiling stall doors in the new showerhouse, clearing brush and cutting back branches from the perimeter trail, turning over the gardens in the Meadow, hauling straw bales up to the gardens, re-shingling a side of the infirmary, making repairs to the floats before they are put in for the season, clearing brush, and a new one: drilling holes in birch logs and hammering in plugs that contain mushroom spores. We’re going to grow oyster mushrooms!

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Our new cook for 2015, Micah Conkling, prepared a wonderful, hearty meal for us. Jobs were swapped after lunch, and the weather continued to cooperate. It warmed up enough to remove parkas and hats. It was truly a wonderful day: we completed many projects, we explored and woke up the island, and new friends were made. 

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New Buzz on Hurricane

This summer, Hurricane Island will be home to nearly 40,000 new residents! We just picked up two 3-pound packages of Apis mellifera ligustica (Italian honeybees) from Sparky's Apiaries, operated by David Smith from Hope, ME. Each package contains worker bees, attendants (a specialized type of worker bee that takes care of the queen), drones, and a caged queen. When we set up the hives, the bees will chew through a sugar plug to release their queen from her cage and she will take off on a mating flight. Except for when the hive swarms, this is the only time she will leave the hive, and from that point on, laying eggs and repopulating the hive is her full-time job.

Apart from the queen and male drone bees, the bulk of the hive consists of female worker bees, who are attending to the queen, cleaning the nest, taking care of larvae, defending the hive, and foraging.Producing honey is no small task. Bees will travel up to 50,000 miles visiting nearly 2 million flowers to forage enough nectar to make one pound of honey. Additionally, it takes a hive to get the job done: a single worker bee produces only 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey her lifetime.

Remember, bees and wasps are different! You can tell if the creature buzzing around you is a bee by observing a few key features: bees have hairy bodies, no defined waist, and flat legs to help collect pollen. Wasps are predators, streamlined to hunt insects, and produce papery pulp nests from chewed up fibers and saliva. Wasps can sting and live to tell the tale, but a worker bee will only sting if it is an absolute necessity--she will die from ripping the sting barb out of her body as she flies away after the attack.

We are excited to welcome this docile breed of bees to the Hurricane Island Community, and are already scheming where to plant new flower gardens around the island to expand their nectar resources. With bees also comes an opportunity for new programs on beekeeping, pollination, colony behavior, and we are excited to start collecting scientific data on our hive health and work with students to conduct new research on bees. Most importantly, we'll be spending time this summer perfecting our waggle dance... Stay tuned!

Teacher Day 2015

Greetings from Hurricane Island…Spring is finally springing!

Last week we were lucky enough to celebrate Spring and Earth Day 2015 with a group of dedicated, inspiring individuals…teachers! A total of 13 teachers from 8 different schools in Maine and Massachusetts joined us for a trip out to the Island for our annual Free Teacher Day, a program we offer to give teachers the chance to learn about our facilities and the programming we offer on-Island. We were also lucky enough to be in Mother Nature’s good graces for the day as we had lots of sun, no rain and light wind all day. It was only my second time out to the Island and the first for many of our teachers, so we all felt thankful and inspired to be sharing such a beautiful day in a magical place!

We had a smooth ride out to the Island aboard the F/V Equinox, arriving on the Island around 10:30. Upon arrival, we took a moment to introduce ourselves to each other and have the necessary safety orientation, presented by HIF’s own Skillful Safety Sam Hallowell. Following safety, Jammin’ Josie Gates, Awesome Alice Anderson and Outstanding Oakley Jackson took us through the facilities of Hurricane Island, highlighting our off-the-grid infrastructure of solar panels and composting toilets, our gardens and compost, and introducing teachers to the teaching spaces and dorms.

After filling our bellies with a delicious lunch, provided by Merry Micah Conkling, and filling our brains with discussion of the possibilities a place like Hurricane provides for educators, we took a more in-depth tour of the grounds outside of the campus and learned about the history of Hurricane Island. We visited the remains of the Church, took a break at the Ice Pond and hiked up to our water holding tanks to talk about our gravity-fed water system. We then made our way down to the cliffs (where we captured this fabulous shot) and continued on to view the quarry and rock climbing routes, all the way sharing ideas, admiring the scenery and learning bits about the Island, it’s ecology and how we run programs.

We ended with a gathering for a short question and answer session and a chance to reflect on the day’s experience. We then re-boarded the Equinox and departed the Island feeling rejuvenated, inspired and privileged to share a day with such dedicated, enthusiastic educators that endeavor to provide students with unique experiences, inside and outside of the classroom. Just another fabulous day on Hurricane Island!

Field Naturalist on Hurricane this Summer

We are excited to have a field naturalist joining us this year as part of the University of Vermont's Master's program. For his master’s project, Ben will be working on Hurricane Island for the 2015 summer season, completing an ecological inventory and asking some prodding questions about the role of fungi, lichens, and other small critters in the overall ecology of the island. 

Ben grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, a city that is somewhere between mountains and coast, small town and big city, old-timey and new-fangled. Although deeply attached to his homeland, Ben happily shipped off to the Pacific Northwest for undergraduate studies at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. In college, Ben took the notion of "broadening your horizons" as literally as possible, traveling to India, banding birds in Mexico and Oregon, and sailing the Oregon coast aboard a tall ship as part of his studies. After graduating with a BA in international studies and a BS in environmental science, Ben returned to Ahmedabad, India, where he interned at an arts-for-social-change academy for a year: writing grants, gaining some web design know-how, and occasionally walking on stilts or singing a few lines in Hindi, as the day required. Returning to Charlotte, Ben did some freelance graphic design, helped start a yoga studio, and worked on the front lines of the budding vegan culinary scene in town.