PORTLAND, Maine — It all began with a bank account.
Back in the 1980s, Robin Robinson was living in the midcoast and taking a lot of pictures of birds. The photos were undistinguished because the camera was kind of a piece of junk. Then one day she opened a new bank account and, as a reward, was presented with a new camera—a really good one. Her photos, once drab and mediocre, became sharp, vivid, eye-catching. “It changed my entire world of birding,” she says.
In the years that followed Robinson took countless photos with that camera and other high-quality pieces of gear, compiling quite an inventory of bird images, which eventually led her to create a Facebook page called MAINE Birds. It now has 20,000 followers from all over the world—France, England, Pakistan, India, Switzerland, the list goes on. People love the site for what it offers day after day: photos of eagles and cardinals and hawks and bluebirds, as seen in Maine, simple and beautiful—and all because of a bank account.