| |
To unknowing eyes, Great Duck Island, located some 10 miles off the coast of Mount Desert Island, seems like a scrubby rock in  the wind, topped by a lighthouse, a few outbuilding and nothing much else. But to the COA community of researchers that live there each summer, Great Duck is teeming with purpose. It's a nesting ground for several very different seabirds who swarm over the island, creating a raucous atmosphere of bird lives that are surprisingly different, occupying quite divergent habitats even on that one small island.
For her senior project, artist and naturalist Sarah Drummond sought to convey this experience to others, mounting a multimedia exhibit within College of the Atlantic's George B. Dorr Museum of Natural History, "Parallel Worlds: Four Seabirds of Great Duck Island."
Drummond spent one summer on Great Duck Island doing an internship in field biology, zoology and natural history with professor John Anderson. While banding and observing birds, Drummond also created numerous watercolor illustrations of the island, its nesting grounds and its nests and birds. Fascinated by the very different habitats and hence experiences of the Leach's storm petrel, herring gull, black guillemot and the common eider, Drummond returned determined to share her fascination with others. The watercolors she painted while on the island form the substance of the exhibit.
 Working with COA professor Dru Colbert, an artist and museum designer, Drummond created an exhibit focusing on the diff1erent habitats of the four birds. Integral to the exhibit are Drummond's small, rather intimate watercolors, which she scanned and enlarged to create six-foot-tall panels. These panels, of woodlands, rocks and ocean, offer viewers a sense of life on the island.
Hatched in rocks, Black guillemots experience mostly sound in their first 30-40 days, writes Drummond on one exhibition panel. A nestling, "can see little but its parents, siblings, if it has any, and the rocky walls of its nest. Beyond the stones, it can hear the plaintive calls of other young chicks hidden in the surrounding rocks, the cacophony of gulls flying overhead and perched above, the fluttering of its parents' wings as they return to squeeze into the next crevice with food and the distant sound of waves sand surf." Meanwhile, uphill in the forests, the world of petrel chicks is silent, dark and quite stable as they spend their first weeks nested inside deep, earthen burrows.
Though adept as a natural history artist, the scale of creating a museum exhibit posed unexpected challenges. "I had to minutely plan each step to get things done, then learn to quickly shift when things didn't go well. It was a steep learning curve to learn the software to create the large panels, learn how to budget my time and how to work with the materials," she explains.
Sarah's lovely records of life on Great Duck Island will be on view at the Dorr Museum for nine months, while Sarah herself is off recording more details of the natural life on other islands. Sarah is a recipient of a 2005 Watson fellowship, given to 50 students at selected colleges across the United States. Sarah's project, "Inquiring Eyes: Natural History Artists and Island Exploration," takes her to the places visited by those early natural history illustrators who were the essential eyes and ears of the voyages of exploration of the seventeenth century.
|
|
