I was a 13- year old fledgling birder when I met Chuck Huntington and we
spent a morning with the fall migrants at Reid State Park. That Christmas
vacation I accompanied him on a stormy passage to Kent Island. We drove
downeast in his 4X4 Chevy Suburban, took the Campobello ferry from Lubec,
then the Grand Manan ferry from Wilson's Beach. The final leg from Grand
Harbour to Three Islands was tempestuous, but the murres and razorbills
were worth the loss of a Canadian breakfast. I spent three teenage summers
working with Chuck on Kent Island banding petrels and herring gulls and
everything else we could catch. We once painted an adult gull brown to see
what would happen, and sure enough, the mature gulls swept on it in a
howling mob, drove it into the water and killed it. That was a lesson in
avian (and human) behavior I have never forgotten. We partied in the
Dingleberry Club and baked white cakes that turned pink from using gull
eggs in the recipe. We banded razorbills at the Murre ledges and
transported petrels deep into opaque Fundy fog then released them and tried
to return to their burrows before they did. We never could. Chuck was an
amazing friend and teacher with an unsurpassed understanding of birds and a
visionary sense of ecology before it became the fashion.
Bill Carpenter, Kent Island alumnus 1954-6
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