The Legacy of Hog Island

In 2006, Hog Island Audubon Camp marks 70 years as a national treasure of wildlife conservation and education.

Inspirational

Since 1936, residential sessions at Hog Island Audubon Camp have been led by some of the most respected naturalists and environmental educators in the nation, in turn inspiring scores of scientists, school and university educators, and conservation leaders.

Roger Tory Peterson, inventor of the modern field guide, was among the first teachers at the camp in the 1940s, where his experiences helped him ignite popular bird watching in the United States.

Rachel Carson, a great force behind the modern environmental movement, visited Hog Island in 1960 and mentioned it in her landmark book Silent Spring.

Dr. Stephen W. Kress, a Hog Island Audubon Camp director in the 1970s, began there to develop Project Puffin, the seabird restoration program recognized nationally and internationally today for reintroducing terns and Atlantic puffins to midcoast Maine islands.

Kenn Kaufman, international birding authority, author, and educator, was only nine years old when he read Peterson’s account of time spent at Hog Island. Now Kaufman teaches a session or two there every year.

And so many more have experienced and shared the island’s magic.

Historic

Once home to the Abenaki people who fished its clam-rich waters, this midcoast Maine island purchased in the late 1600s by European settlers was named, like many islands off the coast of New England, for the livestock that roamed its New World pastures. It remains “ Hog Island ” to this day.

The island’s evolution beyond agriculture and timbering began in 1908 with a visit by David Todd and his wife, Mabel Loomis Todd. Concerned by haphazard logging and overgrazing in the region, Mrs. Todd negotiated with landowners to purchase and conserve much of Hog Island. The Todds built a bungalow within the island’s forest, and Mabel’s daughter Millicent spent many summer hours exploring its spruce-fir forests and abundant tidal pools.

Millicent Todd Bingham inherited the island upon the death of her mother in 1932. Determined to conserve it, she partnered with the National Audubon Society in 1935. John Hopkinson Baker, then Audubon’s executive director, had been searching for a site of ornithological significance where Audubon could protect birds and launch the organization’s first educational camp. Now he had one.

Unique

What began as the dream of a handful of individuals is today one of the nation’s greatest environmental-education success stories.

Audubon’s first Nature Study Camp for Teachers and Adult Students was launched at Hog Island in 1936. The Audubon scientists and conservation-minded leaders who made it possible pioneered a range of hands-on educational activities at the camp, expanding nature education and field-study identification to include an emphasis on the interdependence of living things. Their belief, highly unconventional for the time, was that they could help individuals develop a sustained interest in the natural world, and thereby lead them to support wildlife and natural-resource conservation.

Today, that thinking is the foundation of environmental education nationwide. Those who know the history of conservation in the Northeast recognize its origins at Hog Island Audubon Camp.

Life Changing

Hog Island’s profound beauty, ecological significance, and the lessons it offers about the natural world continue to inspire its visitors to become stewards of wildlife and wild lands. To experience what they describe repeatedly as “the magic of Hog Island,” today’s camp participants travel from across the country. Some call their time on the island “life changing.”

Hog Island is operated by Maine Audubon, which took possession of the island when it affiliated with the National Audubon Society in 2000. Sessions for all ages are designed to highlight different aspects of nature and ecology. Surely, as in past decades, future visionary scientists and conservation leaders are among those who attend.

Staff are enthusiastic, caring experts who interpret the island’s diverse habitats for all levels of learners, including teachers and conservation leaders. More than 20,000 teachers of grades K-12 have studied in Hog Island ’s natural classroom since its earliest days, bringing what they’ve learned, including new ways of teaching science, to hundreds of thousands of students nationwide.