Downeast

Welcome back to my summer blog!  This time last year I was getting acquainted with 85 degrees and 90 percent humidity, but currently I’m in chilly Downeast Maine on a graduate field course, Field Ecology.  Before I get into juicy (not) details, here’s the grand plan: in Maine until Saturday, May 31st (should be home mid-late afternoon) followed by a few days of laundry and catching up and on to Costa Rica the morning of June 3rd.  The plan is to return on August 11th, which is followed by the MCAT on August 15th.  Quite a packed summer…

The goal is not to scare folks away with uncontrollably long posts, so I’ll try to pack the most interesting stuff into the fewest paragraphs. 

We left for Maine on Sunday from UConn, we being five graduate students (Sarah, Leslie, Vanessa, Cory, and Pat), three undergrads (Bianca, Polik, and yours truly), our TA Bryan and professor John Silander.  We’re staying at the Humboldt Field Research Institute aka Eagle Hill on one of the peninsulas sticking down on the Downeast coastline called Dyer Neck.  We’re an hour’s drive up the coast from Bar Harbor/Acadia National Park and 6.5 hours from Storrs.

So…we had to fill out a little questionnaire about dietary and rooming preferences, one of the questions being, “Do you snore?”  Thanks to my wonderful roommates and some enticing videos, I answered “yup.”  Therefore, upon arrival I was given a “special room,” which amounts to a single…in a building 50 yards from everyone else.

On Tuesday we headed over to the Petit Manan National Wildlife Refuge located on the peninsula just West of Dyer Neck.  That’s Bianca, Cory, Vanessa and myself with our backs to the Mighty Atlantic after doing an inventory plot in a heath bog…hehe, bog.  In the distance is Mount Desert Island.  Weather = windy.

More to come on what exactly I’m doing in Maine and what I will be doing in Costa Rica, when you should come visit me and chase after monkeys, and wonderful anecdotes from the Downeast Maine cultural immersion…

BP