Naturalist's Notebook Shop-and-Think Interactive Space Seal Harbor, Maine
The Notebook's lively Seal Harbor home, an 1895 building that we renovated in 2008, sits just a few hundred yards from the Atlantic Ocean and an entrance to Acadia National Park.
When was the last time you saddled up and rode out to the frontier of knowledge? It's a wild, woolly and wonderful place—and it helps you better understand how everything in the universe works.
The Naturalist's Notebook is a fun, hands-on adventure for explorers of all ages.
Shop, think and make art! We help visitors build their creative tool kit—including art supplies and, of course, notebooks—to take out into life and record impressions of what they see and learn.
The tree-shaded deck is a hub for sketching, painting, talks, workshops and quiet relaxation.
It's elementary: Learning about nature and science (and even glowing radioactive glass? yikes!) is easy and fun if you hang around The Naturalist's Notebook.
Artist and horticulturalist Amy Gagnon paints a beautiful Acadia trail loaded with visual insights into the diverse nature of the park. In the background is part of Jordan Chalfant's stunning installation on Acadia's rocky coast.
Welcome to our original installation space, now open year-round! Since 2009 visitors from around the world have been loving the three floors of creative nature-science-learning interactions and shop-and-think installations in our quirky 1890 building in Seal Harbor. It's a unique, fun,13.8-billion-year exploration and an educational art installation with commerce woven in. (Typical comment: "This is the coolest place ever!")
Young naturalist-artists like Jordan Chalfant (pictured here in 2015)—and sometimes kids, families and great scientists as well—help us build the 13.8-billion-year environment while visitors shop and explore.
Named a Best of New England destination by Yankee magazine and a Best of Maine destination by Down East, this space is a one-of-a-kind, hand-made 13.8-billion-year environment that takes you into field and forest, under the ocean, below the ground, inside your brain, into deep space and back to the Big Bang. The bottom floor is a fascinating color-coded timeline history (or Hue-story) of planet Earth.
While sitting on Saturn's rings and learning about the solar system, you can test your brain with an ever-changing variety of puzzles and games.
The minute you walk in, you begin your own 13.8-billion-year exploration. You shop, learn, engage with interactions and enjoy a 13.8-billion-year-brain-building, mind-expanding escape into nature and science. There are no bystanders; you're part of the experience.
Stock up on any of our 1,000-plus titles, written by some of the greatest minds on the planet. They'll take you inside the worlds of science and nature and help you see your biological and deep historical connections to the world around you. Their knowledge helps inform our space.
The Seal Harbor space is constantly evolving. Every year we add and enhance installations and interactions and bring in the voices of more great naturalists and scientists.
Step out of your spacecraft into the Moon Room and you'll be able to look back at Earth as it appears from the lunar surface, 240,000 miles away.
We highlight great naturalists such as Bernd Heinrich and share their discoveries and work. Those are some of Bernd's original paintings for his latest book, One Wild Bird at a Time: Portraits of Individual Bird Lives.
Pamelia directs all of our artistic collaborations and often contributes her own brushwork.
Artist Robin Owings's gorgeous installation takes Ocean Room visitors to the bottom of Maine's Frenchman's Bay to study the life there. Robin drew upon the underwater knowledge of "Diver Ed" Monat (http://divered.com.) We always build installations based on the expertise of those in the field.
The top floor of the Notebook is evolving into a mind palace that shows you what's happening in that amazing three-pound organ that makes you who you are: your brain.
Thanks, whoever left this message during a visit to the Seal Harbor Naturalist's Notebook!
The Naturalist's Notebook
16 Main St.
Seal Harbor, ME 04675
207-801-2777
Click here or the point on the map for driving directions.