Nathan Morgan ’26
By Nathan Morgan ’26
I chose to come to COA because I felt its relatively small size would allow me to make more meaningful and long-lasting connections with the people I met. That, coupled with the ability to create my own path, meant I could maximize the educational opportunities I’ve been receiving.
Things really started ramping up for me in the summer of 2024. Working with professor Brittany Slabach ’09, I did my internship as a field technician, where I conducted live small mammal trapping and radio telemetry on mountain summits in Acadia National Park. Immediately after that concluded, I departed on a 10-week road trip with professors John Anderson and Ken Cline as part of the Great West course. We spent our time learning about the ecology of the areas we visited, had book discussions on literature regarding aspects of the American West, and met with many individuals from different occupations to offer their insights on the work they do (this ranged from farmers to National Park wilderness rangers). I left again in the spring with professors Steve Ressel and Carrie Graham for the Costa Rica Monster Course, where we spent six weeks traveling from field station to field station learning about tropical ecology, entomology, and how to create a natural history journal with field sketches.
Vertebrate Zoology
This course, taught by professor Brittany Slabach ’09, was an exploration of the vertebrate world where we focused on learning about the different taxonomic and evolutionary relationships. Biodiversity, form and function, life history and behaviors, and conservation were topics that we revisited quite often as we made our way through the course. We made frequent use of wet and dry specimens during our lab times. We did dissections and even had a field trip to a local creek to not only investigate the biodiversity of local fauna, but also explore different field sampling methods. This class helped me apply concepts I’ve learned in other courses on a more focused scale, and provided me with pertinent information for my path forward in the realm of field sciences.
An Exploration of Film and Printmaking
Photography has been a hobby of mine for almost four years now and I have yet to take a photography class during my time here at COA. I was craving a dedicated amount of time to start a project, and an independent study with instructor June Kim was the perfect way to meet my needs.
Through digital and film photography, I documented aspects of our local fishing communities. I spent many early mornings down at the town pier photographing fisherman and lobstermen, listening to their stories, and just observing a side of an industry that you normally don’t get to see. This project culminated in a series of prints on aluminum and glass that were displayed at the COA Art Crawl (a time at the end of every term for everyone to display art they’ve created either in a class, senior project, independent study, or elsewhere).
To Catch a Bear by the Hair
Fall term 2025 marked the beginning of my senior project. Its roots sprouted the previous winter, when I conducted an independent study focused on wildlife game cameras as a method to gather data in a field research setting. Working with professor Brittany Slabach ’09, we created a methodology that could be implemented for a carnivore occupancy study here on MDI. I was away in the spring, and during the summer things had changed, as they always do. Black bears, a relative newcomer in terms of MDI’s fauna, had been particularly active that summer, and National Park biologist Bik Wheeler ’09 felt we should shift gears and aim our focus towards them. Now my senior project is focusing on black bear population dynamics. Through the use of a series of hair snares (polygons of barbed wire wrapped around a set of trees with a scent lure in the center), we hope to collect samples of bear fur to run genetic testing to not only figure out how many individuals live here, but where they are going.
