No Place for Citizen Scientists in Rural Northern Maine

I love living in Maine.  I love the mountains where I live, and the forests, and I love the rural setting.

However, as secular homeschoolers, sometimes the remoteness of northern Maine can be frustrating to say the least.
  As a self-proclaimed naturalist, environmentalist, and activist, I'd like very much to be involved in some of the species counts that such organizations as the Audubon Society performs every year.  As The Scientific Homeschooler these sorts of programs provide an ideal opportunity to get my children involved in scientific study, as well as the chance to socialize with other members of the scientific community.  Yet, in our area, there are no organized programs.  I would have to travel more than an hour south with my children in order to participate, and that's just not an option to us, for a number of reasons that I'm not going into in this blog-entry.

It is incredibly frustrating for someone such as myself, who yearns to be involved; who yearns to teach her children to be involved in their community, in their world, to have such a lack of participation.  As homeschoolers, we are already set apart from the mainstream; as secular homeschoolers we are set apart from the mainstream homeschoolers as well.  This means that our circle for socialization with like-minded individuals is somewhat small and limited.  Add to that Winter's particular social issues, and you find some very lonely secular homeschoolers here in northern Maine.

So we continue to go it alone.  We make our own way to ponds, vernal pools, forests, mountains, in our area of Maine.  We make our own observations, look for species of interest on our own, and perform our own scientific research without help or guidance.

This doesn't mean that YOU shouldn't try your hand at involving yourself and your children in such programs available near you.  Go ahead, Google it, go to your local Audubon chapter to see what sorts of events they have up-coming, and involve yourself as a citizen scientist for your community.  The rewards for such active participation are numerous (intangible, mostly, but rewarding still).
Good Luck!