Where ocean meets land there is surf. Islands are well endowed with surf watching opportunities. I took advantage of those opportunities and made many, many photos of the surf over the week we visited Monhegan Island.
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During our week on Monhegan, we hiked most of the trails in the conserved ‘wild’ section of the island which is owned and managed by the Monhegan Associates, a private land trust. This is not difficult to do as the island is less than two miles long and less than a mile at its widest. There are a total of eleven miles of trails (trail map as a pdf file).
In doing this we saw essentially all of the shoreline. All of the shore is rocky and most of it is very steep. There are several headlands where the cliffs drop directly into the water.
Again, I made many (too many?) photographs of the shore line from many different vantage points. Here is a baker’s dozen that it hopefully varied enough to hold your attention.
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The lighthouse on Monhegan Island is an interesting (in that it is unpainted stone) but not particularly tall (at 47 feet) structure that can be seen from many vantage points in the village. The structure does not need to be particularly tall because it sits at the high point of the island putting the beacon at 178 feet above the water.
As with so many lighthouses, the beacon has been automated. Thus the “surplus” structures including the keepers house has been turned into a museum. We were glad to visit and learned much about both the cultural and natural history of Monhegan.
Also present on the grounds of the lighthouse is the original, hand-struck, bell from the Manana Fog Signal station. This Wikipedia article is a bit out of date as it does not state that the facility was decommissioned in 2014. The bell stands roughly five feet high.
I made numerous photos of the lighthouse from many vantage points around the village and at many different times. Here is a very few of them.
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Although our trip to Monhegan Island was mostly about the landscape, I did manage to make a few photographs of the non-human inhabitants of the island even though I did not have a long lens* with me.
There were plenty of birds on the island including, according to Merlin, many nesting warblers along with nesting gulls and cormorants. Common Eiders were also plentiful out past the surf.
The mallards on Ice Pond are clearly habituated to humans. As soon as I showed up on the small beach, every mallard on the pond made a beeline for me expecting a hand out.
There was also a well habituated Herring Gull present atop White Head both times we visited there. I assume that it was used to folks feeding it scraps of their snacks/lunch.
The photos of the seals and the cormorant colony were made when we took an afternoon boat ride around the island… it takes all of thirty minutes to circumnavigate Monhegan Island!
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Late June is also a good time for wildflowers on Monhegan. The beach roses were in full bloom as were many other flowers both large and small.
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* I had my 70-200 mm zoom and a 1.7x teleconverter.
Joan and I spent the past week visiting Monhegan Island, Maine. We spent a weekend on Monhegan almost twenty years ago and said that we should return for a longer visit sometime. I guess that ‘sometime’ was last week!
We got an early start on Saturday (the 18th) for the drive to Port Clyde; we did not want to miss the ferry. We arrived in plenty of time to have a leisurely lunch and wander the village of Port Clyde a bit before boarding the boat. The weather for the trip was good… a bit of roll but nothing too bad.
Upon arriving on the Island, we left our duffel bags to be trucked up to the place we rented for the week and hiked way up the hill to the Daniel Stevens cottage, our temporary abode. The cottage is the last house on Burnt Head Road. The road continues as a foot trail to Burnt Head after the cottage.
Daniel Stevens was a keeper of both the Mannana Island fog signal station and the Monhegan Island light at different times, but as far as we can tell, he never lived in the cottage that now bears his name.
We spent sometime settling in before taking a short walk and then heading back to the village for dinner.
After breakfast on Sunday we took a hike on some of the many trails and arrived back at the cottage for a late-ish lunch just before the rain started. After lunch we relaxed and by dinnertime the rain had stopped and we hoofed it down the hill for dinner. We kept up this schedule for the rest of the week… morning hike, lunch at the cottage, afternoon rest and relaxation, and evening village stroll with dinner. Very delightful!
The weather for the rest of the week was perfect. Highs in the low sixties, lows in the upper fifties and generally clear skies. The fair weather was not the best for landscape photography… bluebird skies and harsh contrast but I managed.
Speaking of photography… I made 1,587 exposures over the week. But don’t worry, I’m not going to show you all of them. I have uploaded ninety-five images (about 6% of the total) that I will show in this and subsequent posts.
Here is an introductory set of photos made pier-to-pier; Port Clyde to Monhegan. The last photo in this series (of a window in the shed on the Monhegan pier) duplicates a photo I made on our first visit. Twenty years ago, their was a broken pane in the window. I was glad to see that it had been repaired!!!
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The second set of photos were made while ‘out and about’ in the village of Monhegan. The village makes up about one-third of the area on the island. The remaining two-thirds of the island is undeveloped conserved land, mostly forest.
The first three photos in this set deserve a bit of explanation. Manana Island is lies a few hundred feet to the west of Monhegan Island; the channel between the islands makes a nice protected harbor. Manana was once the site of a Coast Guard fog signal station. The fog signal was initially a hand struck bell that was eventually replaced with a air powered horn before being abandoned. Manana Island now has a single house, the remains of the fog signal station and a herd of sheep and goats.
I made a number of (OK… way too many) photos of both the fog signal station shed and the solitary tree seen here. I am not sure why they fascinate me but they do!
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Many more photographs to come over the next several days. Stay tuned…
I know that today is Friday… but sometimes things get busy!!
Late Wednesday evening we had multiple reports of a long, loud territorial spat between two loons. Thus, we were a little apprehensive about what we would find when we headed out for a look early Thursday morning.
However, our fears were quickly put to rest as we observed all four loons (two adults and two chicks) on the main part of the lake to the east of the town beach. The birds were behaving normally… adults diving, chicks bobbing and fresh fish served up.
The loon family was too far away for decent photographs, so this post it text only. Sorry about that!
We have two chicks!!!
I arrived at the lake this morning at a few minutes after nine and watched the nest for three hours. It was immediately obvious that there was a chick on the nest. Every so often the adult would lift its right wing and I could see movement under the wing (see the video below, for an example).
At one point the chick moved around in front of the adult and headed into the water. It spent a few minutes in the water (hidden from my view by the emergent vegetation) before climbing back up on the nest and the protection of the adults wing. The adult never left the nest during the three hour I watched.
Two pairs of walkers happened by while I was loon sitting and both mentioned that there was a loon with a chick on the main part of the lake over by the road. The loon, I could believe*, but I was skeptical about the chick. After all, I was watching a chick and an adult sitting on the nest which surely still had the second (unhatched) egg… right?
WRONG!!!
Shortly after noon, I decided that I had enough excitement for the day and headed for the truck. However, before packing things away, I decided to go see what was up with the second loon. (I had heard it call twice while watching the nest.) Much to my surprise there it was, over by the road, accompanied by a chick!
My guess is that one adult headed out with the firstborn chick while the second adult waits for the newly hatched chick to strengthen a bit at the nest.
I ran back to the truck for the camera to document the pair in the harsh, directly overhead, noontime sun.
I am anxious to see what tomorrow brings.
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Video of loon on nest with chick under wing
* Although one has to be careful, a few years ago (during the summer we had our first loon nest on Gregg Lake in living memory) I had a fellow tell me that there had been nesting loons on the lake for a number of years and he had seen them out on the lake with five or six babies! I am pretty sure he had mistaken Canada geese for Loons.
We have a chick!!!!
This morning (Tuesday, 14 June 2022) Joan and I arrived at the lake shortly after nine. An adult loon was sitting on the nest, but we immediately knew that something was up. The adult was very fidgety with their right wing moving about. Sure enough, as soon as we got our optics (Joan’s spotting scope and my camera) set up we could see a small brown lump under the partial upraised wing of the adult (see the first photo below, look very carefully)… a chick!
Shortly after we arrived both the adult and the chick left the nest and spent most of the next hour in the water. They never strayed more than a few feet from the nest. Joan, with a better angle and more magnification was able to see the second egg still in the nest unhatched. (It is not unusual for two nest mates to hatch a day or two apart).
The chick spent the majority of its time in the water during the hour we observed them. However, the chick climbed up under the adults wing and onto its back twice. The adult (with chick aboard) did mount the nest and settle in for a brief interval before entering the water again.
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By our calculus, there should be loon chicks arriving this week. In order not to miss this crucial event, we are planning to head down to the lake each morning to see what is happening.
This morning we arrived at the lake’s edge just after ten and spent an hour observing. When we got out of the truck we were excited to see a loon in the water near the nest, suggesting that maybe eggs had hatched. False alarm… by the time we walked the couple of hundred feet to our usual observation spot, the loon was back sitting on the nest.
Twice in the next hour, the loon stood up, examined (rolled?) the eggs and sat back down. Other than that the only action was the usual wary loon-on-a-nest carefully watching its surroundings.
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A couple of days ago I cut two stalks of ‘grass’ while I was out and about. I thought that they might make a good photograph.
This afternoon, I set up the stalks on our deck railing and made some photographs. I envisioned making black and white photos of the stalks and eventually salted-paper prints.
As I was framing up my first exposures, I had an epiphany… the leaves attached to these stalks are “flag leaves”!
I recently learned about flag leaves from the current issue of The Limrik, Antrim’s quarterly community newsletter/journal. It just so happens that Joan is the managing editor of this esteemed publication. I am, by virtue of being married to Joan, the photo editor and business manager.
One of the articles in the June 2022 issue is about the “Flag Leaf Bakery”, a new bakery that will be opening soon in downtown Antrim. During Joan’s interview with the owners of the bakery they described the origin of its name. I quote…”The name “Flag Leaf” comes from the last leaf to develop on the wheat stalk before the seed head forms. The emerging flag leaf signals the end of the plant’s vegetative growth phase and its photosynthesis provides a large fraction of the energy needed for seed production.”
I am not sure if the stalks I collected are wheat, but the leaves attached to these stalks are clearly flag leaves.
Life is full of interesting convergences!
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