Air Date: Week of November 29, 2024

Seal’s head pokes up above the water. (Photo: © Mark Seth Lender)

The rocky coast of Maine is an ecological hotspot but to see a lot of its wildlife, you’ll have to venture out to sea. And that’s where Living on Earth’s Explorer in Residence, Mark Seth Lender found himself not long ago.

Transcript

O’NEILL: The rocky coast of Maine is an ecological hotspot but if you want to see a lot of its wildlife, you’ll have to venture out to sea. And that’s where Living on Earth’s Explorer in Residence, Mark Seth Lender found himself not long ago.

Namesake
Horsehead Seal
Seal Island
Maine Coastal Islands National Wildlife Refuge
© 2024 Mark Seth Lender
All Rights Reserved

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 Harbor is no longer in sight, I realize, we are under way. And then the sea takes us and there’s no mistaking it. We rove and yaw in the headwind and the swell. Seal Island lays on the horizon, dead ahead.

These are the waters of the Maine Coastal Islands National Wildlife Refuge and they are gushing with life. 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 dive, 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, though they know this is a place of safety. And 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 my thinking is the same.

How fragile it is. This luxury to question.

O’NEILL: That’s Living on Earth’s Explorer in Residence, Mark Seth Lender.

 

Links

Maine coastal wildlife guide, Captain John Drury can be reached through his website

Mark Seth Lender’s wildlife photography can be found here

More about Maine Coastal Islands National Wildlife Refuge