Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
SHOALS MARINE LABORATORY
experience marine life at an island campus
APPLEDORE ISLAND, MAINE
How I wish that somewhere there existed an island for those who are wise
and of good will.
—Albert Einstein
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Most of the four dorms on 95-acre Appledore Island, the largest of the nine Isles of
Shoals, are filled with college students getting course credit for such classes as coastal eco-
logy, oceanic law, field marine biology, and forensics for marine biologists. Several times a
year, however, the remote “research island,” located 6 miles off the coast of Portsmouth, New
Hampshire, invites the public out for three- to five-day adult education programs ranging from
marine science to bird study. Shoals Marine Laboratory (SML) has even been known to throw
in a watercolor painting or nature photography class or perhaps a kayak instruction session.
The classes are all taught by professors from Cornell University or the University of New
Hampshire (UNH), which jointly manage the granite island campus.
Appledore, with its pristine marine and terrestrial habitats and its rocky intertidal and
gravel beaches, makes an ideal natural lab. There are a resident gull colony and a heron rook-
ery (as well as more than a hundred migrant warblers, shorebirds, and sparrows), lobsters, fish,
seaweed flora, and a whole range of marine mammals that swim in the Gulf of Maine, one of
the world's most biologically productive ecosystems.
You'll get to the island on one of the lab's research vessels (they maintain a daily schedule
during the summer season from June to late September), stay in one of the dorms, share meals
at Kiggins Commons, the hub of the campus, and take field trips to the other islands in the
archipelago on the lab's small fleet of Boston Whalers, inflatable boats, a 19-foot sailboat, and
the 47-foot R/V
John M. Kingsbury
.
Although Appledore Island has been a research station for more than 30 years, it once
served as a gathering ground for such literati as Mark Twain and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who
came to stay at the summer hotel built by the father of poet Celia Thaxter. That hotel, one of
the first built on the New England coast, burned to the ground in 1914, but Thaxter's Garden, a
