Eleanor MacKay, on a lifetime of looking.
Retired biology teacher, Deer Isle. Keeping a Maine-coast birding log since the spring of 1991.
My background
I am a retired teacher. I taught high-school biology at the Deer Isle-Stonington High School from 1979 to 2018 — thirty-nine years in one classroom in one town. I grew up in Belfast, on the western shore of Penobscot Bay, and moved to Deer Isle in 1979 to take the teaching job. I have been here ever since. My husband, Robert, was a lobsterman; he passed in 2019. We have two grown children, three grandchildren, and a small house in Burnt Cove that looks east across the harbour.
How I started
I started keeping a coastal-Maine birding log in March 1991, in a small green notebook that I bought at the Stonington Pharmacy. The notebook filled in two years; the second notebook filled in four years; the third has been open since 1997 and is now the principal log. I do not, as some birders do, keep a life list. I keep a coastal-Maine list, by year, by season, by location.
What this journal is
Five long entries, written across one year, on the five seasons of the Maine birding calendar. The entries are personal — what I saw, where I saw it, what the weather was like, who I was talking to on the headland that morning. They are not field guides; the field guide is Sibley, on the bench by the door.
Why coastal Maine
Coastal Maine east of Penobscot Bay is, in my partial reading, the most interesting birding landscape east of the Mississippi. It is the easternmost continental land in the United States, the northernmost reach of the Atlantic Flyway, and the southernmost reach of the boreal bird belt. The intersection produces a species list that no other coastline matches.
What this is not
It is not a guide to where to go birding in Maine. The Maine Birding Trail handles that. It is not an academic publication. The eBird record is public, and the academic ornithology is in the published literature. It is one observer's slow journal, written from one harbour, in one notebook, over one year.
On the open journal
I started the open journal in 2022, after my children suggested it. The closed log — the four green notebooks, on the shelf above the wood stove — is what the journal is drawn from. The closed log will, eventually, go to the Maine State Library; the open journal is, I suppose, a small advance instalment.
Coastal Maine east of Penobscot Bay is, in my partial reading, the most interesting birding landscape east of the Mississippi.
— E. M., Stonington, Maine