Excerpt of Return to Wild America by Scott Weidensaul
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"The most spectacular New World [gannet] colony, the one at
Bonaventure Island off the Gaspé, is visited by scores of bird
students every year," Peterson noted. "It has become a profitable
thing for the innkeeper to cater to—and even advertise to—an unending
succession of summer gannet watchers…On the other hand, the colony at
Cape St. Mary['s] sometimes goes for several years unvisited by any of
the field-glass fraternity." It was easy to see why. The exhausting
hike, first along a muddy, rutted cart track, and then overland around
treacherous bogs, took them until early afternoon, and they didn't
make it back to St. Bride's until well after midnight, Peterson
limping from a badly strained leg muscle.
It's a safe bet that Peterson and Fisher would find Cape St. Mary's
today a strange, perhaps disquieting blend of the familiar and the
unfamiliar. I flew into St. John's with my fiancée, Amy Bourque, who
was taking some time off from the Audubon sanctuary she ran in
Maryland to get me started on my way and would join me at a couple of
other points in the year ahead. Our drive from St. John's to St.
Bride's took a couple of easy hours in a rental car, with just one
stretch of gravel track that skirted bogs bounded by stands of pink rhodora azaleas. It was a cold day in the middle of June; the sedges
and irises made an emerald splash along the coffee-colored rivers,
where a few blackish spruce grew, but higher up, the still-brown
tundra rolled inland beyond the limit of vision, empty of any sign of
humanity.
The reason for this little slice of the Arctic, at the same latitude
as Montreal and Seattle, is the ocean. Pack ice surrounds much of the
Avalon Peninsula until April or May, and throughout the summer
icebergs that originated in Greenland are a common sight, floating
south on the Labrador Current. Especially along the immediate
coastline, summer fogs are an almost daily event, bathing the land in
damp cold that counteracts the wan heat of the sun. This creates an
ecosystem known as hyper-oceanic barrens—a nearly horizontal plant
community dominated by ground-hugging Arctic species like crowberry,
several species of cranberries, hardy grasses, and pale reindeer
lichen in spongy green-white mats, into which a hiker sinks
ankle-deep. Dwarf Arctic willows, with trunks barely as thick as a
finger, spread over rocks like a green cascade, raising maroon flowers
five or six inches above the ground, their diminutive stature masking
the fact that these trees are often three or four hundred years old,
as deserving of awe as any craggy old-growth pine.
From the air, the center of the Avalon Peninsula, and its southern
capes in particular, appear pale brown, edged with black; the brown is
the tundra barrens, while the darker rim is the spruce woods, which
cling to the lower elevations and deeper river valleys. We spent part
of one day hiking along some of the rivers that cut across the
barrens, providing a convenient pathway in the otherwise featureless
landscape. The only green was down along the water, where thick grass
and irises were sprouting, but when we looked closely, the tundra was
coming into great flower as well.
To my eye it all looks like classic Arctic tundra, but there are
enough floral differences that a botanist would immediately peg this
as Newfoundland barrens: a spongy, wet mat of sphagnum moss and
crowberry studded with pitcher plant, the diminutive white flowers of
goldthread, and the pink of pale laurel, barely an inch high.
Cloudberry, Newfoundland's famous "bake-apple," was just opening its
single white flowers that would, by August, produce the delicious
clear orange raspberries that are a provincial obsession. Much of the
ground was covered in creeping juniper or, where there was a bit more
shelter, patches of spruce tuckamore that were barely waist-high but
might be four or five hundred years old.
Excerpt from Return to Wild
America by Scott Weidensaul. Copyright 2001-2003 by Scott Weidensaul.
Published by North Point Press in 2005. All rights reserved. Visitors to
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