Witchcliff
College of the Atlantic has a new library. It is small, and open only by appointment, but it  is deeply meaningful to the extended college community-as well as to the world of ornithology.
The William H. Drury, Jr. Library of Natural History and its associated Drury Reading Room contain the research journals created by Drury, a biologist, ecologist and exquisite botanical illustrator who taught at the college from 1976 until his death in 1992. The library also contains books from Drury's own library.
 Drury received his BA and PhD from Harvard University, where he later served as a junior fellow and an assistant professor of biology before becoming director of research at the Massachusetts Audubon Society.
At a celebration for the library this spring, members of the Drury family joined COA alumni who had worked, interned and sometimes lived with Drury and his family.
Biologist John Anderson, who holds COA's William F. Drury Chair, called Drury, "probably the single most knowledgeable ornithologist on the history and distribution of gulls and other seabirds in the northeastern United States." Drury's surveys and careful observations of nesting colonies lasted more than 30 years, Anderson noted. Eventually, Anderson and Drury  collaborated on seabird research at Petit Manan,
Great Duck, and other islands.
According to Cathy Ramsdell, a COA alumna and trustee emeritus, while Drury had an amazing ability to observe and learn from his observations, what she found most extraordinary was that, "someone who could spend as much time alone in the field as he did, take the kind of notes, do the kind of drawings, could still touch people individually as he did."
The library includes journals, notebooks and other papers containing seabird censuses since the 1940s, historical information on New England birds from the end of the 19th century, as well as other original data about islands in the gulf of Maine, their conservation, and their flora and fauna. The collection also includes bound volumes of some important journals of ornithology and botany, among them, "The Ibis," "Colonial Waterbirds" and leather-bound volumes of "The Auk" going back to 1880. It also includes copies of Drury's book, Chance and Change: Ecology for Conservationists, edited by Anderson after Drury's death.
 Scott Swann, a COA BA and MPhil graduate who is a lecturer at the college and is cataloging the holdings called it, "a particularly elegant collection on ornithology and botany."
Central to the reading room is a plaque with the statement from Drury that has become a motto  at COA: "When your views on the world and your intellect are being challenged and you begin to be uncomfortable because of contradictions you detect that has threatened your current model of the world or some aspect of it, pay attention, you're about to learn something."
For access to the library, email John Anderson at jga@coa.edu or Scott Swann at sswann@coa.edu.
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