Tree coring and Dendrochronology with Associate Professor and Chair of Environmental Studies, Justin Becknell, and Shawn Fraver, Forest Ecologist and Professor at the University of Maine. Plein Air Retreat artists make the most of Allen painting and sketching outside scenes. Colby Alumni, friends, and family venture to Eastern Egg Rock and learn about puffins from Ornithologist and founder of Project Puffin, Stephen Kress. 

Photos by Rachel Hernandez ’27.

Tree coring allows scientists to measure a tree’s rings, which can tell them its age, past historical events, and weather conditions.

Plein Air painting, meaning “in the open air,” involves careful consideration of light and attention to detail to create beautiful works, like those above, in oil, watercolor, and more.

Stephen Kress, seen above with the microphone, studied puffins on Eastern Egg Rock starting in 1973 with the formation of Project Puffin and is responsible for the Atlantic Puffins’ return to using the island as a breeding site.

Island Campus Fellows live and work on Allen Island for the summer.   Each fellow spends half time on a mentored research project. The other half of the job is supporting the Island Campus programming by greeting island visitors, serving as an educational resource, and helping to maintain the islands.

This year we are delighted  to have Catrin Carey ‘25 returning to the Island Campus as the Senior Summer Fellow.   Catrin leads the fellows team delivering programming support the over 2,500 guests that visit Allen Island each summer.   Catrin works closely with Jake Ward, Island Campus Manager to provide a safe and welcoming teaching and research environment.   Catrin graduated in May with a degree in Global Studies: Global Health Concentration.   Her 2024 island research focused on the curation historical and pre-historical archives. This involved curating a master database of the catalogs created by the Maine State Museum. The Maine State Archaeologists had previously cataloged the materials after their digs, but we only possessed the physical and scanned copies. By creating a master database these materials are more easily accessible future island researchers. 

Over the summer of 2025, Catrin will develop and design fellow directed and self-directed tours of tours of the Island Campus.  Look for an online tour posted to this website toward the end of the summer.   Details on specific island buildings and points of interest will be accessible through QR codes stationed throughout the island.  The goal of this project is to expand access to the history of  Allen and Benner Islands to better appreciate the historical and architectural aspects of the islands. 

Four new Fellows will join Catrin on the Island Campus for the summer of 2025.  A short description of their research projects are provided below. 

Recording Dynamic Relationships by photographing the landscape, myself, and the people on the Islands, Oliver Beardsley ’27

Growing up in Maine, I’ve acquired an intimate bond and deep love for Maine’s islands
and coastal areas. I’ve never had the opportunity to immerse my soul into island life. My chosen field of study is Photography. Like many artists before me, choosing to put myself in a specific place and live and work there for an extended time is greatly appealing. I want to know the islands like the back of my hand.

“Photography is such an important instrument in the education of our feelings and perception because of its duality. Photography represents the world we know and suggests a world beyond what we can see. Creativity is the gap between perception and knowledge.” —Emmet Gowin.

I’d like to photograph with an 8×10 camera because of the unparalleled detail its
negative is capable of producing; revealing more detail than my naked eye could see when
composing an image on the ground glass. By working with this slow-to-use, process-oriented camera, I can more easily contemplate the complexity of my subject matter.

“…poems are like trees in this way. They let us breathe together.” —Ada Limón.

I’d like my process to become related to the island itself, as Limón likens her poems to
her interactions with trees. I can imagine recording the dynamic relationships by photographing the landscape, myself, and the people on the Islands, as well as the traces we all leave behind.

As I do more work in the same place, delving into my deep connection to Maine’s coast, my
interpretations will become more comfortable going beyond the perceived image of the islands. What I hope to receive from this fellowship and working experience is a deeper
understanding of my creative impulses in response to Allen, and Benner Islands. I will make a portfolio serving as a visual remnant of my interaction with the islands that inspires others to care and interact with them more. Simply, I can see a relationship between the island’s soul, and my creative soul that I wish to explore.

Biodiversity of Bees on the Islands, Jack Brenner ’26

Working with Professor Dave Angelini’s developmental and evolutionary biology lab, I
will be examining the biodiversity of bees on Allen Island and its relationship to the local
community composition. Over the course of years, Professor Angelini has visited and collected bee specimens on Allen Island to add to a longer-term project, examining the distributions and morphology of bee species. This research began when sheep grazed the island and continued after they were removed. The removal of the sheep drastically altered the landscape and the plant biodiversity of the community, as the plants preferred by the sheep were no longer being grazed. With this change in plant species composition, Professor Angelini observed a shift in the composition of bee species inhabiting the island. However, the data collected to observe this difference in bee species’ composition was limited to roughly monthly visits. By being on the island, where I can regularly collect field samples of the local bee populations and identify the specimens, I could capture a higher resolution of this hypothesized shift in biodiversity.

On top of identifying bee specimens, I would also work to identify plant species on the
island, specifically which species are interacting most closely with each bee species. Using these data, I would further my understanding of the shift in bee populations as the plant composition changes. This data would also help supplement the ongoing research project conducted by the Angelini lab, which is examining the comparative morphology between Maine bee species and their food preferences.  In previous research examining the ecomorphology of bees in Ontario, it has been found that there is an association between bee morphology and the use of plant species (Harder, 1985). Specifically, researchers found that there was a relationship between the strength of this association and the species richness of a given plant species (Harder, 1985). This finding supports the hypothesis that the shift in species richness due to the cessation of sheep grazing would alter the bee morphology and possibly bee species composition as well. Utilizing the vault space that is currently being converted into a laboratory with new equipment, I could take pictures of the bee anatomy and add them to the pre-existing database to be measured. Currently,
the lab uses published research examining the relationship between specific bee and plant species from other areas of the United States. By conducting this research on Allen Island, taking bee samples, and noting the plants they pollinate, I can provide direct observational data to support this ongoing research project.

Allen’s Alternative Field Guide, Rachel Hernandez ’27

Photography has long been intertwined with the history of Allen and Benner Islands. Peter Ralston, a prominent photographer known for capturing Maine’s islands and coast, grew up next to Andrew and Besty Wyeth in Pennsylvania. Thanks to them, Ralston was introduced to Maine. His most famous photograph, “Pentecoast”, captures sheep on a boat getting transported to the Wyeth’s recently purchased island, Allen, for grazing. My project, “Allen’s Alternative Field Guide”, aims to continue the islands’ legacies of being a unique place for the creative practice to take precedent and build on Colby’s mission of making it an excellent place for environmental learning as my work will conclude in the presentation of a handmade field guide book constructed with alternative photographic processes, including cyanotypes and lumen printing. I will be mentored by Professor Gary Green, who has ample experience with alternative photographic methods, including cyanotypes. I plan to familiarize myself with Allen’s flora, expanding my knowledge through independent research and identification of the terrestrial and aquatic vegetation and their place within the island, allowing me to explore my academic interests in the connections possible between art and our environment.

Taking inspiration from Anna Atkins’s Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, the first photographically illustrated book, and Hannah Fletcher’s The Mushroom Book, I am eager to get hands-on with the brimming life that makes up the region in an eco-friendly way. My techniques will not require extensive chemicals like traditional photography, I will utilize the islands’ natural resources with camera-less photography by placing specimens on treated paper/materials for cyanotypes and photographic paper for lumen prints.

Normally, lumen prints are fixed with harsh chemicals, but I will take a different approach. I will explore a sustainable process of using sea water – which will be readily accessible while I live on Allen Island – salt, and warm water to make a non-toxic solution that will fix my prints after a few hours to a day. I also plan to experiment with botanicals, wood ash, and kitchen materials I find for bleaching and toning my cyanotypes. By taking a sustainable approach to my practice, I will be able to preserve the island’s natural habitat and not have
to go to the mainland to discard chemicals or require a full photography studio setup. I will be able to spend more time on the island and strengthen my connection to it so that I can accurately capture its environment artistically and scientifically.

The research supporting my artistic practice will look into the islands’ environmental history to help formulate what may be in my field guide and to understand how the islands became what they are today. Some questions to consider include the following: How has the biodiversity of Allen changed over time? What flora have we lost? What flora has been introduced? What is their importance to the island’s ecosystem, positive or negative? I am excited to use my residence on Allen to learn from those who have long worked on the islands and any biologists who come to conduct research to further my understanding of the environment. I intend to produce a field guide that will be helpful to any future endeavors related to working with the island’s ecology, inform the public of the wildlife on these lands, serve as a basis for documenting the evolving biodiversity, and encourage others to use and appreciate art as a way to communicate with and learn from the natural world.

Evaluation the St. Georges Island Channel for Portable Underwater Generation, Lachlan Bailey ’27

 The purpose of this project is to determine whether the installation of a 10 kW NxMAR Portable Underwater Generator (PUG) in the strait between Allen Island and Benner Island can produce significant power for the Island Campus.  I will use GPS enabled sonar to create a high resolution bathymetric map of the St. Georges channel.  Using the map data, phase II of the project will measure current velocity using submerged tilt sensors.   Combining bathymetry, tide, and water velocity I will create a 3D map of channel velocity as a function of tide, depth,  and channel location.   Velocity is proportional to energy density and will inform models of PUG energy production.

This work is part of a larger goal of moving the Island Campus to net zero energy consumption.    A 10 KW PUG has a relatively small power output, about the size of a typical residential backup generator, but has the potential to produce power every day during the incoming and outgoing tides.   Coupled to the power grid in Port Clyde through an existing underwater cable, the PUG can export power to the grid during periods of high flow and low island electric demand.   The islands will import power from the grid during  peak demand.    Our preliminary estimate suggests that one PUG could meet close to 100% of the Island Campus electrical energy load averaged over a year.   The models of PUG performance will improve these estimates and proved sighting data for a possible generator test in the fall of 2025.   This project is part of the broader goal of  shifting the Island Campus heating fuel loads from propane and diesel to sustainably produced electricity.