CMM Sends Delegation to Sable Island

When a delegation of five people with the Confederacy of Mainland Mi’kmaq (CMM) traveled to Sable Island in September, the experience was one that left a lasting impression them all. 

The trip, staring at the crack of dawn and about the length of a workday, brought a group of directors, managers and a former summer student to the island – which is a different world unto itself.  

CMM Associate Director Wyatt White, a member of the delegation that went, stressed the importance of Parks Canada’s highly tuned support for the island. 

“That is a neat aspect. They are managing it and trying not to dominate or colonize or develop it. They’re avoiding doing anything that is against the island continuing to prosper,” White said. 

For Alyx MacDonald, Director of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) with The CMM, the experience was surreal, from the moment he spotted the seals and wild horses from the aerial approach to the quiet moments he reveled in the stillness and solitude, exploring an island nearly 300 miles, as the crow flies, from Halifax. 

“At times, you forgot that we weren’t going to just turn around and see streets, and lights and buildings,” MacDonald recalled. 

“The landscape there, though protected, has changed a lot.” 

Being there “brought a lot of concepts into place” for MacDonald, noting it was eye-opening to see a place so unaltered by the touch of humanity.  

“It’s one of those things, unless you were there and seeing it, it’s hard put to words how surreal it feels,” he said. 

Stewardship of the Land 
 
The daylong trip was an opportunity for MacDonald to get a firsthand glimpse into the work The CMM’s Earth Keepers have been doing. 

The DENR team (a cohort that includes the Earth Keepers) has worked closely with Parks Canada, the arm of the Federal Government in charge of Sable Island, as well as the Unama’ki Institute of Natural Resources (UINR) and several other groups to preserve Sable Island.  

“It was a great privilege to get there, only so many people in the world get to go,” MacDonald said. 

“It was great to see how our mission integrated with that of Parks Canada, and how that changed.” 

The trip was part of a broader effort on DENR’s part to re-indigenize the environmental stewardship of the environment, part of a broader Etuaptmumk (Two-Eyed Seeing) approach to taking care of the environment.  

MacDonald said the trip validated that work, with community values on display. 

“Just being there is making space for instilling community values into the work, and how to look at the landscape. Sometimes, just observing and being part of the picture is important in and of itself, because it instils those values into how you see the landscape,” he said. 

“There isn’t a perfect solution to conservation or preservation, and its important to see how humans and species interact with the ecosystems.” 

Sweat Bees 

The Sable Island sweat bee – an endemic species the Earth Keepers have been monitoring for more than five years, was another reason MacDonald wanted to visit. 

The local sweat bee is listed as threatened under the Species at Risk Act. 

The trip was part of a bid by DENR to build a greater presence on the island, where its Earth Keepers have been busy in their conservation efforts. 

Memorable Moments 

Along with the loud seals, MacDonald felt a particular fascination with the fenced-in freshwater ponds on the island. 
 
The ponds on Sable Island are fenced off to preserve them from the erosion constantly in effect on the island – and that act of preservation has had a discernible effect on their appearance and biological footprint. 

“The biggest moment something clicked for me was seeing the work Parks Canada was doing on those ponds,” MacDonald said.  

“They’re fenced off to see the effects of doing so, and they’re more of a wetland area, and less of a pond when fenced off.” 

Evidence of the impact of any activity on the dunes was ample, from erosion to the simple act of horses eating grass growing from them. 

“There’s a lot of traffic from the horses, and to turn that back helped me envision what the island would have looked like,” MacDonald said. 

Touring the Island 

The delegation – which also included CMM Director of Aquatic Resources and Fisheries Management Tyler Sack, Former Summer Student Abby MacMillan and Capacity Development Advisor Anthony King – toured the island end-to-end, walking and riding side-by-sides amid the dunes, inland ponds and grasslands. 

“You’d just keep thinking, ‘there must be rock underneath all that sand,’ but it truly is a hug sandbar,” MacDonald said of the scenery. 

Research staff with Parks Canada accompanied the delegation, explaining their work and duties on the island – staff who spend intervals as long as nine months at a time, on the island. 

“An Obituary Moment” 

Rebecca Page-MacDonald, CMM Manager of Communications, described the trip to Sable Island as an “obituary moment,” a life-changing event. 

“Less than one per cent of the world’s population will ever go to Sable Island and it’s a very dangerous place to get to,” she said. 

Sable Island is called the ‘Graveyard of the Atlantic,’ a nod to its dangerous shoals and the hundreds of ships and lives they have claimed – the remnants of which can still be found lying all around the island. 

Sable Island is also difficult to approach by sea or sky, surrounded by strong tides and choppy seas, with a sandy, rocky shore. 

In a place like Sable Island, where life and death hinge sometimes on things as out of human control as the weather, Page-MacDonald said her perspective on death was changed.  

“It was kind of enlightening, seeing how life is there, seeing how death is not an ending, but more of a new addition to the island,” she said. 

“When horses die, it provides nourishment to the soil, because they took from the soil. It’s the same with seals, providing food to the wildlife and vice-versa. It’s very interesting to see. It’s not as devastating as death can be.”  

Untouched and remote, Sable Island made her reckon with the dangers and benefits alike of being in a place so out of the way. 

CMM Associate Executive Director Wyatt White returned from Sable Island firm in the belief that he’d just come back from the trip of a lifetime. 
 
“I count myself very lucky to have been able to go. When I first heard of the opportunity to go, my first thought was, ‘Oh, this is amazing – but why?’ and when I found out we have some work happening there, and part of our organization is spending time doing research in support of projects there, I thought, ‘Seeing is believing,’” White said.  

“Having a chance to see, for myself, the connection that exists there and how we, as an organization, support its protection and conservation was great. It’s a great way to highlight the amazing work the organization does.” 

To begin with, getting out there can be a challenge, only about a third of the flights out to Sable Island can safely land. And even The CMM’s delegation faced turbulent skies on the return trip.  

White was grateful the trip to the island took place in a helicopter, instead of a plane. 

“There’s no actual landing strip, they just go with the driest patch of sand that day, and on the other hand, there’s a helicopter pad on the compound,” he said. 

The approach to the island in the Atlantic stretching 290 KM southeast of Halifax, as the crow flies, was fantastic, Wyatt said. 

“The first thing I was looking for was, of course, the horses. It was a bit of a surreal moment.” 

Sable Island is well known for its wildlife – a variety of migratory birds, the din of herds of hundreds of braying seals and, its most iconic residents, its wild horses.  

“When we were getting ready to land, the helicopter tilts forward and you get a better view, as you’re coming in, 50 or 60 feet above the terrain,” White said. 

The horses are roaming, and a couple were running. It was so neat to see the landscape in motion.”  

Sable Island’s wild horses are descended from some of the survivors of the many shipwrecks the island’s sandy shoals, swimming to safety and adapting to the island’s unique climate.  

“You hear so much about the island and the horses in particular, but later you think, ‘Oh my gosh, the seal colony is actually massive,’ and there are all sorts of other interesting things, too,” White said. 

While there was a necessary degree of separation, White said it was fascinating to be able to share the island with them for a time. 

Shifting Sands 

White described Sable Island a massive sand dune that changes from one season to the next. 

Sable Island is barely noticeable on a map. A shifting 42-kilometre crescent of mostly sand, it’s mostly held together by the banks of marram grass, and its highest point is about 90 feet above sea level. 

Despite its small size, it’s a place of many distinctions. 

“One thing that stood out for me, beyond the species there, is how ever-changing, and dramatic the landscape is,” White said. 

That landscape gets respect from the Parks Canada staff who take care of the island. 

White noted one example of that respect stands to mind – staff are taking apart and move a building near a shifting dune, to accommodate the changing landscape. 

“Their plan is to migrate it and rebuild. I thought that was a neat way to be stewards of the island, letting the island run the show, with humans being secondary,” White said.   

Movement around the island was not as harshly restricted as he expected, with a handful of places fenced off.  

White and the others were encouraged to explore while on the island. 

The group took a tour of the island in side-by-side all-terrain vehicles that ran about an hour and a half, going through the dunes. 

“You really had a chance to walk and be almost everywhere, the restrictions were purely for precautionary purposes,” he said. 

Although guests have latitude to roam with few restrictions, one hard rule on sandy Sable Island is the no-contact rule with the wildlife.  

Visitors to Sable Island are advised to maintain a twenty-metre distance from all wildlife – that includes the wild horses.  That, in fact, leads to the one kind of traffic jam possible on remote Sable Island – having to stop when a horse in front of you stops. 

“They were only small areas, and it’s really just to keep the infrastructure separated from the horses,” White said. 

Wild Horses 

As someone who owns horses, Page-MacDonald found it fascinating to see the wild horses – animals she found surprisingly healthy and with few significant differences from the ones back home on the mainland. 
 
“They’re all big eagers and just kind of mosey around. It was interesting to see that evolution of horses, versus mine, which are strategically bred and raised,” she said. 

“The wild horses have no health care, no feeding regimen in their naturalized habitat, and were not interfered with by humans. It’s amazing to see them so feral and healthy.” 

A World Apart 

Ironically, Sable Island’s remoteness makes it a great place to study the impacts of human waste, with garbage from across the sea washing up on its shores. 

“It’s interesting and sad to see the work that’s done by other NGOs studying the impacts of humans – and that they can impact something – when only one per cent of the population has and can visit Sable Island, and yet you have Nova Scotians, Americans, Asian and Swedish shipping vessels impacting it,” Page-MacDonald said. 

During their visit to Sable Island, The CMM’s delegation met Zoe Lucas, who has spent the last five decades working there. 

“She started going there in the eighties to study migration patterns of seals and ended up living on the island, and now she solely studies garbage and recycling and the patterns of it,” Page-MacDonald said. 

“She catalogues everything. They run serial numbers on items to see how it got there. It’s not just vanity science, they’re actually looking at how things got there, the life cycle of things.”  

Zoe only leaves the island in the winter, during the seal mating season, when there is nowhere on the island to escape the deafening racket the thousands of the aquatic mammals kick up. 

Of a Different Cut 

Page-MacDonald said people like Zoe and The CMM’s Earth Keepers are a rarity, since “…you have to be a very specific type of person to find the seclusion of Sable Island cathartic.” 

“There are people who cannot wait to get back from the island and there are people who dread leaving the island. I don’t know how you could do that for months at a time. It’s too quiet and secluded.  You have to be a very different person to enjoy that solitude,” she said, noting that people are at Mother Nature’s mercy, when on Sable Island. 

“Our Earth Keepers are definitely of a different cut to be out there for weeks at a time, and with the weather during hurricane season, face the potential to be out there for weeks longer than initially intended.” 

Page-MacDonald said that while a day or two would be fine, she knew she’d eventually long for the amenities, activity – and safety – of the mainland. 

“It made me realize there is a severity in emergency situations for people living in remote locations. If someone got sick what would that look like?”” 

“By the end of one day, I was excited to be back to being able to walk where I want to walk, and you know, driving a car and not a side-by-side.” 

Looking back, Page-MacDonald said the thing she found herself saying the most while on Sable Island was, “Hmm, didn’t expect it to be like this.”