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Dorr Museum of Natural History
College of the Atlantic senior Sarah Drummond spent last summer painting seabirds and their habitats on Great Duck Island, 10 miles off the coast of Maine.
 Beginning this summer, and for the next year, she'll be painting the seabirds, insects, rocks, lichens and more on islands around the globe as a recipient of a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. This fellowship, given to 50 college seniors each year from selected institutions across the United States, offers the graduates $22,000 to travel outside the states on a pursuit of their own design. Drummond's project, a venture called, "Inquiring Eyes: Natural History Artists and Island Exploration," will take her to London, Argentina, Chile, Tahiti, Australia, New Zealand and Sri Lanka to follow the work of the great naturalist illustrators who accompanied early exploratory voyages.
Drummond, of Woodland, CO, came to College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor four years ago, where COA's interdisciplinary curriculum allowed Drummond to focus on both art and science. "COA is the only college I applied to, it's worked out beautifully," she said in a recent interview. "I was homeschooled in high school. I was very used to being very self directed and this was a great place to continue that."
This young artist with vibrant eyes and long, brown hair says she can't remember
a time when she didn't draw; nor can she  remember a time when she wasn't outdoors, exploring. Then she discovered nature drawing. She not only found a new kind of expression, but a new way of being. "I began to see in ways I didn't know before," she says. "I remember having watched nature shows as a kid, and seeing all these interesting things, such as ants tending aphids on spruce needles. I'd always think, "How did they get that?'" Once Drummond began drawing, her own observation skills sharpened immeasurably. She started to see like a naturalist. The daughter of a field biologist, her family lived beside Forissant Fossil Beds National Monument, near Pikes Peak. From that time on, she immersed herself in the world she loved to draw.
Drummond continued to combine serious scientific study with her art throughout her four years at College of the Atlantic. Her senior project, is an exhibit in the college's George B. Dorr Museum of Natural History called, "Parallel Worlds: Four Seabirds of Great Duck Island." The exhibit combines blow-ups of her own drawings with her research of four Great Duck Island seabirds.
According to COA zoology professor John Anderson, Drummond is equally a scientist and an artist. "I can never decide whether this is an artist who is fascinated by science or a scientist who does art, but we all benefit from the outcome," he wrote in her application to the scholarship, adding, "She has an incredible eye for detail, both in reading and in the out-of-doors. This project builds on a long-standing passion and extensive training and will serve as a springboard to Sarah's future career . . . [and] will enhance and enrich our lives and our understanding."
The Watson fellowship funds a year of travel during which the recipient cannot return to the United States. It was launched in 1968 by the children of Thomas J. Watson, Sr., the founder of IBM Corporation and his wife, Jeannette K. Watson, to honor their parents' long-standing interest in education and world affairs. The year of travel offers fellows an opportunity for exceptional students to test their aspirations and abilities and develop a more informed sense of international concern. Since 1968, the Fellowship Program has granted more than 2,300 Watson Fellowship awards, with stipends totaling more than $29 million.
Drummond's journey will take her to the areas drawn by some of the great naturalist illustrators who worked in the years before photography. "Their work was often the only documentation of what the explorers found," she explains. "Often, new species weren't described. Scientists just relied on the artist's drawings." The illustrators' work was also often published, a way of obtaining some financial gain after the long voyage. Drummond's focus on the naturalists' island visits relates both to her work on Great Duck Island, and her fascination with the unique geography, flora and fauna of islands.
Her travels begin in London, where Drummond will look at the original paintings of these early naturalists. Then she'll head away from cities. Says Drummond, "Captain Cook sailed through Tierra del Fuego. The artist on his third voyage was Sidney Parkinson. Then the voyage of the Beagle went by there. Conrad Martins was with Darwin in South America, until the admiralty cut his funding." The Beagle also visited Chiloe, off the coast of Chile, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia and Sri Lanka. Not only will Drummond be going to these islands to see where the artists worked and how the habitats they painted have changed, but she'll be making her own illustrative documentation of her voyage, painting the flora and fauna that these artists created.
Captions:
Sarah Drummond at the exhibit she created for the Dorr Museum of Natural History: "Parallel Worlds: Four Seabirds of Great Duck Island," and a close up of one of her illustrations.
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