John Drury, one bare foot on the gunnel the other on the dock, fends off, takes the wheel, throttles up so smooth, I’m on the work deck checking the camera gear and it’s only when I glance astern and the ferry slip at Vinalhaven is no longer in sight, I realize, we are underway. And then the sea takes us and there’s no mistaking it. We rove and yaw, it doesn’t bother me one bit; maybe because a Jarvis Newman 36’ has so much beam or maybe the way she takes the swell. We are making nine knots. Seal Island lays on the horizon, dead ahead.
These are the waters of the Maine Coastal Islands National Wildlife Refuge, they are gushing with life and I am here for that. Beside us in the water young shearwater, their plumage brown and white and soft. Naïve to us they look at me without judgment, no opinion having been formed of human beings one way or the other. Rain threatens but there is none. A pair of harbor porpoise, a mother and her calf of the year, their backs and dorsal fins obsidian black in the half-light cut across our wake. They sound, leaving no trace.
An hour later we are there.
Great slabs of bedrock clamber for space cracked and cleaved where ice and time have split the stone; a vertical of gray basalt where molten magma crept from the belly of the earth; the smooth slope where Ice Age glaciers shaved the granite clean and a live beard of seaweed meets the waterline.
Seal Island.
John Drury pilots us to the backside where the surf rolls in from the Shelf and there they are, true to the island’s name, a bob of horsehead seals! Old bulls, females and their young. Unlike the shearwater, wary. They catch fish, not everyone welcomes that. But instead of diving or breaking off they stay where they are and raise their heads neck and shoulders above the water as if on solid ground, “Who’s this? What does he want? Why is he here?”
They look at me and have their doubts. I look at them and have no doubt though my thinking is the same.
How fragile it is. This luxury to question.
Special thanks this week to Brian Benedict, refuge manager, Maine Coastal Islands National
Wildlife Refuge
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Field Note
That night reviewing my photographs, not far from where the horsehead seals were gathered I found conical fractures. Only one thing does this: bullets. By which I mean ballistic projectiles fired from a higher caliber weapon, not errant birdshot. Seal Island was a US Navy bombing and target range until sometime in the 1960s. How birds and seals faired under enfilading fire is moot. But what removed the puffins in particular was being caught in unrestricted numbers by meat hunters using nets. This same technique, using nets to catch birds, has been employed by native arctic hunters to such effect entire islands off the coast of Greenland have had their population of Alcidae (the auks, including among others black guillemot and puffins) extirpated, a practice that continues even now. When we say protection what we mean is, from us. Bullets and unexploded ordinance may well be preferable to the tread of human feet and what our hands can do.
When the puffins leave Seal island for the winter, the refuge staff resident on Seal Island also leaves. But not the seals. The cold months into the early spring when seals give birth, this is their time of peril. Without laws, specifically the Marine Mammal Act which – remarkably – does create an element of restraint and most especially without the National Wildlife Refuge System to provide a degree of enforcement, it’s Devil Take The Hindmost.
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Maine coastal wildlife guide, Captain John Drury can be reached through his website: https://www.maineseabirdtours.com/
Mark Seth Lender’s wildlife photography can be found here: http://marksethlender.com/
© 2024 Mark Seth Lender