Natural Instincts

When Dr. Bob or Mother Julie rang the handbell at the Kellogg house, chances were good that Judy, second oldest of six children, didn’t respond immediately to the meal call. The Kelloggs’ house was high on the steep east bank of the Kenduskeag Stream, and the bank and stream were the children’s private discovery museum. While all the children loved nature, Judy was perhaps the most smitten and fearless; her brother Zip remembers her “capturing eels in cans and bringing them up to the house.”

Today Judy Kellogg Markowsky is in charge of a different discovery museum—the Fields Pond Audubon Center in Holden. As guardian of the 192-acre sanctuary and its onsite L. Robert Rolde Nature Center, Markowsky is responsible for managing an impressive schedule of learning experiences, from walking and canoe tours to lectures and overnight field trips.

Her career path back to nature, and to Maine, was not a straight one. After graduating from Bangor High School, Markowsky thought the best way to pursue her interest was as a zoology major at Smith College. “But in our labs we ended up pithing frogs—destroying their brains.” So she switched to majoring in French, went on to earn a master’s degree in library services from the University of Maryland, working for several years as a children’s librarian at a New York library.

“I enjoyed that work,” Markowsky says, “but books were not my first love. Nature was.” So, when she and her young family decided to move back to Maine in 1984, she started a doctoral program at the University of Maine in science education. Two years later she started working for the Maine Audubon Society. Here her interests and experience converged, as she was able to use her talents to help Audubon fulfill its mission of “connecting people with nature.”

“I started ‘Secrets of the Forest,’” she recalls, “which scheduled field trips for students to study wildlife on the campus fields and woods.” Soon busloads of students were coming from as far as Machias and Augusta. Part of her strategy was to stretch her resources by training others. “Through a series of programs I taught volunteers how to be naturalists who would lead the field trips,” she says. ”At any given time there were about 40 volunteer leaders, university students, and Maine Audubon members.”

Markowsky’s ability to help create and expand opportunities was put to the test in 1992. “We found out that Katherine Curran had willed part of her Orrington property to the Nature Conservancy. However, because the property had once been farmed and logged, it did not have the pristine quality that the conservancy seeks.”

The executor of the will decided to invite proposals from other nonprofit conservancy groups. Portland and Bangor area Audubon staff and volunteers worked together to generate the winning proposal, raise the capital, and construct the Fields Pond Audubon Center, which opened December 1997—with Judy Kellogg Markowsky as the director. She has also managed to tap into her children’s librarian background by writing two teacher’s guides: Everybody’s Somebody’s Lunch: The Role of Predator and Prey in Nature (with Cherie Mason), and Shelterwood: Discovering the Forest (with Susan Hand Shetterly).

No question about it—despite what she herself calls a “zigzag” life, Markowsky has been in the right place at the right time ever since she returned to Maine two decades ago. Also no question: She draws on the inspiration gained from those field trips she and her five siblings took behind their home on the banks of the Kenduskeag.