(HOST) Commentator Tom Slayton is a confirmed bird-watcher. But he also likes to watch people. And recently those two interests came together for him in an unexpected way.
(SLAYTON) Trap Day on Monhegan Island is probably the event that best typifies the island’s tight-knit community. It’s also a good day to stay out of the way, if you’re a birder.
That’s because on Trap Day Monhegan is all business. Each of the little island’s lobster fisherman is completely focused on one thing: getting their 300 lobster traps into the water and catching the season’s first lobsters. They don’t have time to bother with bird watchers.
"Any other day, the trucks will probably stop for you," said our guide, Bryan Pfeiffer. "But on Trap Day or the day before, they might run you down."
Pfeiffer has been leading birding expeditions on Monhegan every fall for more than a decade. The island is an ideal site this time of year because of the flocks of migrating birds – primarily warblers and vireos – that land there after being blown out to sea by northeasterly winds. Great birding!
But while we were watching birds, the lobster fishermen were moving thousands of traps to the dock one day, then moving them onto boats and into the ocean the next.
There’s a certain baseline frenzy involved because Monhegan’s lobster fishermen do not fish between June and October first. Monhegan is the only Maine community that restricts summer lobster fishing.
October 1 is officially Trap Day because that’s when the traps go out. But it might also be called "Money Day" or "Income Day" because that’s the day the lobster fishermen start making money again after a three-month break.
The roads are narrow and unpaved. So it’s up to the birders and other tourists to stay out of the way as the fishermen move stacks of the big wire-cagelike traps through the little village and down to the dock.
"Truck coming!" was the repeated cry throughout the day. And little knots of birders who had been intently peering into the marsh or the trees or some house’s decorative shrubbery would hop up onto the roadside banks as the trucks – full of very serious, hard-working men and women – bumped slowly past them with their stacks and stacks of traps.
The birders got out of the way quickly, usually with polite smiles pasted on their faces. Both the birders and the lobster fishermen knew the island’s pecking order. And so there were no birders run over, no untoward incidents of any kind that I saw.
In fact, I found Trap Day fascinating and encouraging. I was glad to get out of the way of real people doing real work, fishing and taking care of an important community resource.
It’s interesting that what may be the most tightly regulated fishery in Maine’s waters remains one of its most successful. Understanding the finite nature of that resource – any resource – may be part of what you learn, living on an island.
But we all live on some island or other. It’s only the size of the island and the resources that are different.
Perhaps we could all learn a little something from the lobster fishermen of Monhegan Island.