Kirk Gentalen grew up in New Jersey, within sight of New York City. Since leaving home to attend college in California, he’s lived in several states, working as an environmental educator along the way. In 2007 he started working for the Maine Coast Heritage Trust, where he is the regional stewardship manager for Mid-coast Maine and writes about the ecology of the area in his Nature Bummin’ blog. He lives in St. George, Maine, with his wife Amy and their son Leif.
There were two things I wanted to be when I was growing up: a baseball player, and a park ranger. During high school, I joined my school’s “Environmental Action” group. We got the cafeteria to use reusable trays instead of disposable ones and the school to implement recycling, that kind of stuff. After several summers of attending basketball camps, I told my school counselor I was interested in going to a nature camp. He found a clipping he had about the science program on Hardwood Island, just off Mount Desert Island in Maine. I went to Hardwood Island the summer before my senior year. There were about 15 of us who lived in a barn for two and a half weeks or so. It was a game changing experience for me in many ways. I studied milkweed plants. I visited my first beaver pond. I saw a bald eagle for the first time. I learned what a black-throated blue warbler was. The coolest thing was going to Acadia National Park, and I thought that those rangers had a cool job, and I thought, “I could do this.”
At Hardwood Island, I traded t-shirts with a young woman, Andrea, whose brother went to the University of California at Santa Cruz – the fightin’ Banana Slugs! She had this shirt from UCSC with banana slugs all over it. I thought it was so cool that I traded my favorite tie-dye for it. That was the first time I had heard of Santa Cruz. I ended up going to college there. It was a great move for me, and my nature appreciation took off from there. I got my degree in environmental studies and took a series of classes called “Natural History Field Quarter.” I got into birdwatching then, and had an epiphany when I realized it was something I could do every day, all the time. Now I see that bumper sticker that says, “I’d rather be birding,” and realize I want a bumper sticker that says, “I am bird watching.” It’s something you can’t turn off.
After college, I got to try out my dream of being a park ranger. I went to Olympic National Park for the winter of 1994 to help develop a kids’ discovery room at the Port Angeles Visitors Center. I realized that I didn’t want to be a park ranger – you have to have a uniform, and the Park Service is pretty rigid about that. At the same time, my friend was doing environmental education in Wisconsin, and a co-worker of hers quit. So I moved there to start my environmental education career at residential nature camps for 5th or 6th graders. Working with kids was easy for me – if you can make kids laugh, they’re right there with you. Once you have two or three jobs in environmental education and you have experience and references, there are all kinds of jobs all over the place. These are three- or four-month jobs, and you could really get to know the place if you wanted to. I went from Wisconsin back to Santa Cruz, then ended up in Ohio. Ohio was great – tons of warblers, saw all kinds of stuff for the first time.
After a while, I started picking places to work by what birds or animals I was hoping to see. These are places I’d probably never be able to live if I wasn’t working right there. And you learn all these different things. I went to Georgia because I was hoping to see painted buntings. And they come to feeders there, which is crazy. I went to Cape Cod to see right whales, and they were spy hopping right off Race Point in the wintertime. The program on the Cape is called the NEED Collaborative and is based in Truro at the Pamet Coast Guard Station. It’s a hostel in the summertime, and during the school year, kids from area school systems on the Cape would come for 3- or 5-day programs. The program was awesome and the house was fantastic. Out the window, I watched coyotes pulling a harbor porpoise carcass across the dunes. I saw snow buntings for the first time out that window – a hundred of them flying around.
Amy and I got married at a Pigeon Point Lighthouse in Pascadero, California, and we ended up living there. It’s a hostel that has an environmental education program, and since I worked at both, we got to live there. From our window we’d regularly see humpback and gray whales. Once I saw blue whales from our bedroom window – and that was the best. After we got married, we led bear and eagle tours in Haines, Alaska, which was phenomenal. In Homer, Alaska, I led tide pooling excursions – there are 25-foot tides, and people plan their entire vacation around low tide days to take these tours. You would see so much – the Pacific giant octopus, sunflower sea stars.
I wouldn’t call myself a naturalist. I would call myself a nature observer – or a nature bum. At my first job in Wisconsin, one of the things we were taught is that it’s OK to say you don’t know, which I think is an important thing that all naturalist-types should be able to say. I didn’t like saying that too many times – if I said, “I don’t know” three times to the same question, then I should probably look that up. I got into the habit of referring to field guides and doing research all the time. I even called my room “the research kitchen,” in honor of Frank Zappa. And I would lead hikes on the same trails that I would walk in my free time.
I’ve always wanted to make sure that my hikes are as good as they can be, so I wanted to know as much as I could, but not be a know-it-all. I learned quickly that birds are great, but they can be hard for a group of 5th graders to focus on. And that’s why I got into mushrooms – for the kids! Mushrooms don’t move no matter how loud a group is, and kids are low to the ground and have fun finding them. I seldom pick mushrooms – chanterelles and king boletes being exceptions – I leave them behind for others to see. Kids want to know if it will kill you – and, if so, how it will kill you – or if you can eat it. I would do a lot of research so I could share stuff with kids. It used to be you had a backpack full of field guides and your back hurt at the end of the day. Now, with a camera, you can take pictures of all kinds of stuff and go back and look it up.
I’ve worked with MCHT since 2007. I went from having jobs for three or four months to now 16 years in this job. I’m a regional stewardship manager – one of several for MCHT. It’s a fun and interesting gig. I do a lot of trail maintenance and also deal with forestry issues and invasives, such as bittersweet, brown tail moth, winter moth, to name a few. I am on and work with different town committees. I also monitor easements with landowners. My job keeps me outside a lot, and I like that. Most of my adult life has been spent in the woods, either with fifth graders or by myself.
One challenge of working as a land steward is making sure the visitor experience doesn’t affect the ecological integrity of the area – thinking of impact, thinking of numbers of people. Trying to minimize impact while still providing a good quality experience can be a little tricky. And as far as ecological integrity goes, invasives are a challenge. We get properties that can be kind of loaded with invasives, and MCHT is aggressive at these times. Sometimes folks will point out that maybe a neighbor isn’t thinking of removing invasives, and we can end up with a strip of quality habitat. But I learned a long time ago that every little bit counts.
I spend a lot more time with chainsaws than I do with kids these days. I lead bird walks in spring and summer, and I’ve got mushroom walks lined up this fall. In the winter I give talks at libraries and also lead animal tracking outings. I also do these writings. So there is some education. There is some forestry. Up here, spruce maritime forest management on islands is mostly getting things to the ground so they decompose faster. But also dealing with brown tail moth – they’re cute little caterpillars, and they can be all over the place, but their hairs are awful. Ticks are also a big thing up here now, so we work on getting grasses cut back on the trails – trying to provide a safer hiking experience. I also work with volunteer groups. There are a lot of parts to the job.
I love it when people tell me what they saw from the trail. We’ve been doing this Vinalhaven Sightings report for 15 years now or something like that. I love emails that say, “I saw this pile of scat, and I thought of you.” And I love seeing people out there when I’m working on the trails. Land trusts in Maine (and probably all over New England) have done a really good job developing trails and access to beautiful places. Providing these trails for people is really important – just seeing people out there enjoying it is enough for me. I’ve met a lot of really cool people out there.
I feel like I’m the target audience for nature. I’m totally open, I’m ready, and I love to share it with anybody. I lead these walks, and I don’t know what people are expecting, but they’re going on a walk that I would go on myself. It seems to work out.