Birdsacre: A Sanctuary in a Sea of Sprawl

Cordelia Stanwood’s home has been preserved as a center where injured birds can live out their days in safety. Visitors can tour her home and view some of her collections.

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BIRDSACRE A Sanctuary in a Sea of Sprawl How Birdsacre came to exist, and endure, in Ellsworth is a story of perseverance, second chances, and finding peace in unexpected places.

BY KIM RIDLEY

Richmond, however, isn’t fazed. A licensed bird rehabilitator who has cared for hundreds of injured avians and tended the sanctuary over the past 25 years, he has been bitten, poked, and scratched more than once.

The owl is calmly perched on Richmond’s hand by the time children from a local day camp have assembled on the back deck of the nature center for his owl program. Richmond explains that today is the first time this new owl has been in front of people. Small hands immediately fly into the air.

“What’s his name?” a blonde boy asks.

“What does he eat?” chimes in a girl next to him.

“Owls eat two or three mice a day,” replies Richmond, “and we’ll probably call him Lefty.” A soft-spoken man in his early seventies, he adds firmly but goodnaturedly, “When I’m done talking you’ll get to ask all your questions.”

The hands lower as Richmond tells the campers all about owls: How they have been around for at least 40 million years. How they have one big ear and one small ear, three sets of eyelids, and vision so sharp they could spot a mouse at the fast food joint a few hundred yards down Route 3.

Kim Ridley (right)

Donald Cramer (right and below)

Danielle Blocker (left)

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T’S HARD TO KNOW quite what to make of Birdsacre Sanctuary the first time you pull into this funky little compound smack in the middle of Ellsworth’s big-box sprawl. A cursory glance reveals a modest cottage surrounded by a few wizened apple trees and ramshackle outbuildings that house injured hawks and owls.

Spend even a little time there, however, and the subtle magic of this place unfolds before your eyes—especially if Stan Richmond happens to be around to guide you.

On a hazy summer morning, Richmond stands outside in the shade, trying to calm a cranky young barred owl. He patiently holds it by tethers tied to its legs as it madly flaps its single wing and whirls around his arm.

The owl, which lost a wing after it was hit by a car, hisses at Richmond. Its talons could easily pierce his rawhide glove.

(left) A boardwalk allows people of all ages and abilities to enjoy Birdsacre. (right) Stan Richmond introduces an owl to sanctuary visitors. www.maineboats.com

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photographs by Danielle Blocker(4)

Lest anyone in the audience imagine that owls are cuddly creatures straight out of the world of Disney, Richmond tempers his amusing stories with a cautionary tale. He tells the children about the time he grabbed the leg of a great horned owl with his bare hand to prevent the bird from escaping. “The owl tried to hold hands with me,” Richmond says as he shows the children his scar.

The children are rapt. No one fidgets. The only motion is a teenaged counselor swatting a hornet.

After everyone asks their questions comes the moment the children have really been waiting for: a chance to get close to the owl. As Richmond holds the owl, the children quietly approach it in groups of two or three. Their faces reveal their emotions: excitement tinged with fear, curiosity, and something close to reverence.

“I’m not an environmentalist,” Richmond tells me later as he returns the barred owl to its enclosure. “I’m a pragmatist. I think our society is having problems adjusting to what’s coming along, because we’ve forgotten how to pay attention to anything. I try to help kids and adults learn to slow down and pay attention. This place gives people an opportunity to get out of the rat race.”

Thousands of children—and adults—have visited Birdsacre since it opened on the Bar Harbor Road in Ellsworth 50 years ago. Part wild bird rehabilitation center, part nature sanctuary, part historical museum, it draws all sorts of visitors. School children and families come to see the injured owls and hawks that live here, visit the Richmond Nature Center and Stanwood Homestead Museum, and walk the trails that wind through about 200 acres of woods and wetlands that will never be developed. Audubon groups lead bird walks here, and garden clubs and master gardeners come to admire the wildflowers and help with the grounds. Others visit for reasons they can’t quite name. As funky and home-

grown as it is, Birdsacre is a sanctuary in the deepest sense of the word.

A need for sanctuary is what brought a teacher named Cordelia Stanwood back home to this very spot more than a century ago. Seeking peace and healing, she discovered the birds. If it weren’t for the Richmond family’s devotion to preserving Stanwood’s legacy, Birdsacre wouldn’t exist.

This forested island in a sea of sprawl would likely be just another strip mall surrounded by acres of asphalt.

JUST BEYOND the nature center, trails beckon visitors into woods and wetlands that are home to more than 100 species of birds. The air grows cooler and smells of balsam and white pine. A patch of delicate pink twinflower blooms beside a mossy log. The roar of traffic fades, then gives way to birdsong. A black-throated green warbler sings “zee-zeezee-zoo-zee”; a hermit thrush releases its high, fluting song from a hemlock.

In the spring of 1905, Cordelia Stanwood heard these same species singing as she roamed the woods surrounding what was then her parents’ 40-acre farm. A successful teacher and supervisor of drawing in Massachusetts schools, Stanwood had suffered a nervous breakdown and fled home to Ellsworth to recover. Exhausted, alone, and approaching 40, she had no idea how she’d make her way in the world if she couldn’t teach.

“Cordie really didn’t want to come home,” says Stan Richmond’s sister Diane Richmond Castle, a striking woman in her sixties who lovingly tends to the Stanwood Homestead Museum. “Her parents didn’t know how to help her. That’s when she went out into the woods.”

Among the birds in her own back yard, Stanwood found her calling. The warblers, thrushes, and other birds she encountered on her rambles so captivated her that she started studying them, spending entire days bushwhacking MAINE BOATS, HOMES & HARBORS

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through buggy swamps and thickets to investigate their secret lives. She named her beloved home ground “Birdsacre.”

“In the beginning,” Stanwood wrote, “the study of feathered folk is a delightful torture. There are such a variety of…songsters to become familiar with that the novice confounds the call notes and airs of one bird with those of another….When the bird lover has once mastered the vocabulary of the feathered people he begins to be truly in touch with them. Then as he steps into the woods, it seems as if an invisible curtain drops down behind him and he is in another sphere.”

Stanwood jotted meticulous field notes on everything she observed in this magical sphere. On one foray, she described the nesting materials used by magnolia warblers (spider’s silk, cinquefoil stems, horsehair, hay, and plant down). On another, she noted that newly hatched golden-crowned kinglets “are about as large as bumblebees” with mouths “the color of the meat of a peach around the stone.” Her passion for observing the feathered denizens of her childhood home led to the life’s work she had never imagined.

In 1910, Stanwood accomplished a rare feat for a woman of her day: she began publishing her bird articles in leading ornithological journals, such as The Auk and Bird-Lore, the first publication of the nascent Audubon Society. In 1916, she did something even more extraordinary: she bought herself a chunky Eastman Kodak glass plate camera and lugged it into the woods to photograph the birds she loved.

Cordelia Stanwood may well be the first American woman to photograph birds professionally. Her most remarkable images evoke a spontaneity rare in photography of the day. Among her most extraordinary photographs is a portrait of a black-throated blue warbler family as a parent bird lands on a branch with a moth in its beak for three hungry fledglings. She took this photograph nearly a century ago, but the moment still feels fresh.

Throughout the 1920s, Stanwood’s articles and photographs appeared in popular magazines and ornithological journals. She wove science, personal observation, and a keen ecological awareness into each piece.

“Chickadee renders valuable services these winter days,” Stanwood wrote in an article for House Beautiful. “He eats the…eggs of moths that would destroy our fruit and foliage….The mite of a bird that looks so helpless in the midst of a vast world of snow and ice is doing the work it would take a wise man to accomplish, and he sings while he labors!”

Although Stanwood didn’t break new ground with her work, she contributed to a deeper understanding of nest building and other behaviors in 20 species of birds, including hermit thrushes, black-throated green warblers, and several other species of these small, elusive songbirds. Frank Chapman of the American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian’s www.maineboats.com

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A.C. Bent were among leading ornithologists who respected Stanwood’s work and corresponded with her. Stanwood’s observations are included in such seminal bird books as Bent’s Life Histories of North American Birds, Edward Forbush’s The Birds of Massachusetts and Other New England States, and Ralph Palmer’s Maine Birds.

Stanwood also advocated on the birds’ behalf. She joined with other conservation-minded women in the early 1900s to lobby Maine lawmakers to support an amendment banning the importation of feathers for women’s hats. She wrote editorials in the Ellsworth American and elaborated on her own feelings in her field notes. “A hummingbird in the bush is much more to my taste than a dozen stuffed, wired hummingbirds, parrots, or a multitude of wings made of feathers,” she wrote in 1913. “After all, our taste in millinery is more or less barbaric.” The feather ban passed that year.

In spite of her success, however, Stanwood struggled.

Writing never came easily to her, she was reclusive, and she struggled financially. A “spinster” with an elderly mother to support, she supplemented her income by making hooked and braided rugs and elegant baskets.

(above) Cordelia Stanwood’s desk and piano. Her home is maintained just as she left it. (opposite page, top) Cordelia Stanwood as a young woman. (opposite page, bottom) Stanwood’s research contributed to a deeper understanding of nest building and other avian behaviors.

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The latter craft she learned by apprenticing with the Penobscots near Old Town.

Still unable to make ends meet, she also sold greeting cards and other small goods door-to-door in Ellsworth. In her later years, she moved into one room of her house, carried her own firewood, water, and kerosene up steep, precarious stairs and refused help of any kind. She died of cancer in a nursing home in 1958.

THE LEGACY Cordie Stanwood left behind—nearly 50 years of field notes; close to 1,000 glass-plate negatives of birds and nests, plants and trees, and area homes; and her many journal and magazine articles—may well have been forgotten if it weren’t for one man: Chandler Richmond, Stan’s father. An Englishteacher-turned-insurance-salesman, Richmond, too, was captivated by birds. When he and several others began sorting the papers Cordie had donated to the fledgling Cordelia Stanwood Bird Club, he knew he couldn’t let them languish.

“The idea that this treasury might get tucked away on the back shelves of a library to gather dust was intolerable to me,” Richmond wrote in Beyond the Spring: Cordelia

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J. Stanwood of Birdsacre.“I was committed.”

Chandler Richmond secured the purchase of Birdsacre in 1959 with the personal backing of local banker Hervey Phillips and established the Stanwood Wildlife Foundation. He rounded up his fellow Rotarians and other volunteers to begin restoring Stanwood’s crumbling cottage, and opened the Stanwood Homestead Museum on August 1, 1960—what would have been Stanwood’s 95th birthday. He became the museum’s curator and manager, and dedicated the rest of his life to Stanwood’s memory: tending to the sanctuary and museum with his wife Marion, devoting 20 years to researching and writing his biography of Stanwood, and, of course, caring for the birds.

A magical fellow who smoked a pipe and often walked around Birdsacre with an owl perched on his shoulder, Chandler Richmond taught himself how to care for injured birds. Over the years, he worked with 121 species, from the ruby-throated hummingbirds to the bald eagle. He released those that could fend for themselves in the wild and provided injured birds, such as his beloved owls, with a safe home. Wildlife rehabilitators often asked

his advice, as he had gained a wide reputation for his extraordinary skill.

E.B. White was among the many people who sought Richmond’s expertise. White had rescued a catbird from his yard after a January snowstorm, reviving it with diced apples and a bit of beef stew. After a few days, however, the catbird’s feet became so severely curled it couldn’t grasp the perch in its cage.

White called Richmond, who told him to bring the catbird over, as he was caring for several birds in his cellar.

“I assumed that the curled toes meant that her feet had been frozen,” White wrote to his friend Reginald Allen in 1971, “but Richmond said he thought it was more likely a pesticide calamity and that he would massage the feet. There’s a man for you—down cellar on bitter winter nights, massaging a catbird’s toes!”

Chandler Richmond also had a wonderful way with people. “My father had his Morris chair and a little gas heater in his study and it was very cozy,” Stan Richmond recalls. “One time a reporter came and spent three hours just listening to him.

She told him, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to write anything or not, but this has been

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so nice.’ That’s what he wanted most of all, for people to have an experience, and that’s what I think we’re obligated to do—relate to our fellow man, in a sense.”

Stan Richmond, who joined Birdsacre in 1982 and took over as caretaker in 1990, has inherited his father’s way with birds and his charm. One minute he’s caring for a critically wounded hawk, the next he’s bantering with visitors. There is an elusive quality about him, a playfulness that belies a depth.

Like Chandler, Stan has made plenty of sacrifices to keep Birdsacre going, working countless unpaid hours to maintain the facilities, care for the 20 or so injured birds that live at the sanctuary and the dozens more that are brought here each year, and helping to drum up support to enable Birdsacre to protect land from the enormous pressures of development. It hasn’t been easy, but Stan is determined to keep his father’s vision alive. He sums up that vision in a handful of words: “We just want to keep it small and personal.”

TODAY, BIRDSACRE draws all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons. Gwen

www.maineboats.com

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Chandler Richmond had a winning way with both birds and people.

Albee started coming by a few years ago, because she found it healing to walk the trails and be around the birds. With Richmond’s guidance, she soon started helping to care for them. “Stan is my adopted father,” she says, smiling playfully at him.

Albee cautiously opens the door to a tall enclosure, where a young great blue heron eyes her suspiciously. “You’re still alive!” she softly exclaims to the bird, which had been brought in a couple of days earlier with a wing so badly shattered that it had to be amputated. Albee loads a syringe with liquid antibiotics and slowly approaches the heron. The

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bird clacks his long, pointy beak at her; he could, quite literally, poke out her eye.

“He hates me,” Albee says as she firmly grasps the young heron’s beak, opens it, and carefully squirts the antibiotics down its throat. She then pops a dead mouse into the bird’s mouth and gently works it down the heron’s long, skinny neck and into its stomach.

“It’s a complete protein with the fur and bones,” Albee says. “In two hours, he’ll get salmon for fish oil.”

The heron was too young to feed himself when he was brought in, but the Birdsacre crew is teaching him, using goldfish in a shallow tub of water. This bird was near death and wouldn’t survive in the wild, but there’s a chance that he will be able to live out his life in captivity.

“Most rehab places won’t keep permanently injured birds,” Stan Richmond says. “It’s ‘Live Free or Die,’ like New Hampshire. Here, they have a chance to live out their lives, and people can come here to learn about them.”

Dozens of orphaned and injured birds—from baby sparrows, to gulls, to red-tailed hawks and everything in between—are brought to Birdsacre every

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This handsome hawk will be released.

Grayson, for the day’s next projects.

Every day is different, and everyone does everything—whether it’s cleaning enclosures, fixing a roof, maintaining trails, welcoming visitors, using chopsticks to feed baby robins, or answering the phone.

There are no job descriptions here.

A low-key man in his thirties, with a long ponytail and traces of his father’s features, Grayson Richmond returned

home to Maine after studying English literature at colleges out west and taking trips abroad to Ecuador and Costa Rica.

He says the sanctuary was the first place his parents brought him after he was born; he fondly recalled watching his grandfather Chandler carrying around a ruby-throated hummingbird perched on a green pipe cleaner. So, it seems only natural that he came back to Birdsacre, where he is assuming the reins as Stan eases into semi-retirement.

“It’s a nice place to work and a nice place to be,” Grayson says simply of his decision to return. “People come here to be at home. It’s pretty laid back. Kids can collect apples, feed the geese, run around.

We get some people who are interested in turning this into a more formal nature center, but we’re here to be intimate and approachable. If Birdsacre gets too fancy, we’ve lost that connection.”

Birdsacre’s quirks are part of its charm. The trail map is hand-drawn and a bit ambiguous. The nature center features taxidermy, an antique egg collection, and eclectic memorabilia rather than slick, interactive displays. Many of the bird enclosures are cobbled together

Don Cramer

year. About half of these birds will survive and be released back into the wild.

Albee is among a handful of volunteers who patiently nurse the birds and help keep this shoestring operation running.

A pale, slender woman in her thirties, with large, dark eyes and a bracelet of light blue flowers tattooed around her wrist, Albee moves among the birds with confidence and quiet grace. She checks in on the three broad-winged hawks in another enclosure. She points to the youngest one, a handsome, crow-sized hawk with a chocolate-brown back and rust-stippled breast; he was brought in as an orphan. Soon, he’ll be released.

“I hand-fed him,” she says. “That’s one wild, fierce bird. We’ll be releasing him soon.” Watching the birds she’s helped raise and heal return to the wild, Albee says, “is just like having a baby.”

Like the Richmonds, Gwen Albee has become deeply inspired by Cordelia Stanwood. “I’m into mindful awareness, and I think Cordie had that kind of awareness,” Albee says. “Even today, she’d be ahead of her time.”

After tending to the birds, Albee checks in with Richmond’s son,

Danielle Blocker

from scrap lumber and heavy wire. Yet something genuine and rare shines through all the fustiness and funk. In this cherished place, one can gaze straight into the eyes of a great horned owl, study the pea-sized eggs of a hummingbird, or wander woods that have been virtually untouched for a century.

The words of Cordie Stanwood herself echo down the years from a hand-lettered sign nailed to a tree: “Intimacy with nature is acquired slowly,” the sign says.

“You look and listen, bewail your stupidity, feel that you have acquired little new information; yet, are determined never to despair or give up. All at once you know what you never dreamed you knew before.”

Nearly a century after Stanwood wrote those words, Birdsacre persists, which some observers say is a wonder itself.

“As Ellsworth has developed, the sanctuary has become an island of habitat,” said Jonathan Plissner, an avian biologist in Oregon who volunteered at Birdsacre as a teenager in the 1970s and 1980s and dedicated his dissertation on bluebirds to Chandler Richmond. “There is an incredible

IN A WIRED WORLD, Birdsacre offers the rare opportunity for a visitor to unplug and encounter the wild, not just in birds but perhaps in oneself. Time seems to slow down here; it eddies and pools. The Richmonds can’t tell you how that happens, and they still struggle to describe the sanctuary they lovingly maintain. Grayson Richmond says the best description he’s seen is on an oldhand painted sign he found while renovating the registration building. The sign simply says, “Birdsacre is.”

Kim Ridley is a Brooklin-based freelance science writer and editor (www.kimridley.com).

“We’re here to be intimate and approachable,” says Grayson Richmond.

value in its persistence and continuity.”

Plissner fondly recalled helping Chandler introduce children and families to Birdsacre’s owls and other birds, an experience that he said has shaped his own views on conservation.

“People are much more likely to protect and conserve the things they’re intimately familiar with,” he said.

LOCATION: 289 High Street, Ellsworth, just beyond the Ellsworth Car Wash (stay in the right lane). Follow the signs onto the property.

HOURS AND ADMISSION: The grounds at Birdsacre are accessible during daylight hours year-round. The Richmond Nature Center and Stanwood Homestead Museum and gift shop are open from the end of May into October from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. daily. Admission is always free; donations are welcome. 207-667-8460; www.birdsacre.com