Visitors to the Gilsland Farm Audubon Center in Falmouth have no doubt seen the construction taking place in the northern section of the campus. We’re thrilled to announce that in May, we’ll be opening the Ann and Jim Hancock Native Plants Education Center. This building will expand our capacity for conservation horticulture and native plant restoration, create additional programming space, and serve as a gathering place for the community. Adjacent to this, a new Stewardship Annex will provide storage and workspace for our seasonal teams that work to protect coastal birds and Common Loons, as well as all the equipment we use to steward our grounds, facilities, and sanctuaries across the state.
What you might not have seen is the work that started in October on the Visitor Center building, farther down the road. So far, much of this work has focused on less visible systems upgrades to increase building performance, but beginning in February and running through April, renovation work will become more visible as we undertake projects that will result in a more energy efficient and comfortable space that meets more modern standards and incorporates bird-friendly architectural features.
When the Visitor Center opened in March, 1996, it was a cutting-edge example of green design and construction that incorporated passive solar, radiant floors, geothermal heating, recycled steel, green certified wood, and other earth-friendly materials and design. And for years the center has served Maine Audubon and the community well, and has provided space for campers, public programs, retail operations, weddings, meetings, and so much more. But when the HVAC system failed in December, 2024, after several years of increasingly complicated fixes, it became clear that we needed to look at the 30-year-old building as a whole. Our properties team took this as an opportunity to review the building and its systems on a holistic level and undertake a deep energy retrofit designed to increase energy efficiency and leverage recent advances in sustainable building material technology.
So far, Maine Audubon has replaced the existing HVAC system with air source heat pumps, upgraded building ventilation, added significant insulation above the ceiling, and replaced the roof. The next phase of the project will refresh and improve the building envelope. The existing cedar shingle siding will be replaced in kind, but underneath we’ll add more than 3.5” of exterior insulation, which will almost double the insulation “r value” of the walls. Rather than using polyiso foam board insulation, which is commonly used in this application but has a large environmental footprint, we’ve sourced a newly-released wood fiber board product produced by Timber HP, a Maine-based company that uses trees from Maine to manufacture its products.
Finally, we’ll be replacing all the windows and sliding glass doors with high efficiency triple-pane windows, and all the new window treatments will be bird safe. Look for more details on this exciting step forward to come, as we turn Gilsland Farm into a demonstration site for the work of BirdSafe Maine.
Kaplan Thompson Architects, Mathew Alcorn Builders, Bruss Project Management, Petersen Engineering and Atlantic Comfort Systems are our primary partners on the project.
At the same time that we are reducing the energy usage footprint of the Visitor Center, Maine Audubon is also increasing the amount of electricity we produce on the Gilsland Farm campus. In addition to the rooftop and tracker-mounted solar arrays we’ve installed across campus over the last 15 years, we plan to install new arrays on the Native Plants Education Center and Stewardship Annex that are projected to produce an additional 60,000 kwh of electricity a year, which will further reduce the amount of energy Maine Audubon purchases from other sources.
Our goal is to complete the majority of this work before summer 2026. We appreciate your patience, as it will mean some closures and restricted access to the building. We’re working to find ways to continue to offer a full slate of winter and spring programs, and to minimize disruption for the Nature Store, which will largely remain open to the public for the duration of the project With these updates, we look forward to decades of continued use of this very important hub for Maine Audubon’s work and mission.
