Artfully rearranged

Today was one of those days when all is not quite as it seems.

We are in Kouchibougiac National Park in New Brunswick: 92 square miles of forest and wetland, edged with barrier islands, shifting sand dunes, lagoons, and salt marsh. Right on the edge of the Northumberland Strait.

We walked the water’s edge along Kelly’s Beach and part way down the South Kouchibougiac Dune, before retracing our steps and finding the Salt Marsh Boardwalk. Some 10 miles or so, taken slowly, as we watched common terns fishing the lagoon, seals offshore, ring billed and bonaparte gulls, cormorants, white winged scoter, bank swallows, and juvenile bald eagles haunting the nesting grounds of the piping plover. In so many ways exactly what we had come for.

But as we walked I was struck by the artificiality of the Park. The bicycle trails are wide and top dressed, their edges trimmed and tidy, and they wind in slow curves through the forest. There is signage – and clear prohibitions against straying off the designated way. And then there is the Park’s emptiness. What you are walking through is the recreation of a virgin wilderness that it never was. There are no houses or cabins – just the Park buildings and the campgrounds. Yet most everywhere else we have been the past fortnight, as we travelled the North Shore and then the length of the Gaspé Peninsula, the land along the forest or shore edge is lived on, worked, busy with people.

Over a 1,000 people were removed, and not without difficulty, to create this Park – descendants of both Mi’kmaq and the Acadians. The anger and resentment involved in the creation of this Park is acknowledged (and Parks Canada subsequently changed its policy on forced removals) but the very silence of the Park speaks to it more eloquently.

Watching the eider raft savaged by black backed gulls as we did at Ragueneau eight days ago and experiencing nature artfully rearranged, with the inconvenient parts removed or smoothed over, are not quite the same thing.

Not the ending we’d expected

Late afternoon and one of those spur of the moment stops. We’d left our Tadoussac campsite early, to look for a king eider that had been reported as being close in by the dock at Les Bergeronnes. No luck. We saw plenty of eider but no king. We drove on, stopping at Longue-Rive (nothing of note but two heron) and then again at Portneuf (more eider, as we expected but otherwise gulls).

We pressed on for our campsite at Baie-Comeau but the bay at Ragueneau looked interesting.

Parked up, we walked past the fairground dinosaurs (no real explanation as to quite why here) almost to the edge of the water. There was a raft of eider duck out in the bay, being shadowed by three great black backed gulls. The raft was close bunched up (unusual for eiders) but as they came alongside the rocks opposite, the raft split, males one way and females a little further along. And among the males a king eider. Not what we were expecting and a real surprise. We’d travelled some 90km along the North Shore, and here one was.

As we watched, the raft set out towards the bay, still close set. And we suddenly realised why – eider chicks being shepherded closely. And then a bald eagle fast and low over the water from the right. The raft dived, and as it did, lost that close knit protection. The eagle turned, came in again, talons out. The eider dived, surfacing even more spread out. Once more the eagle wheeled round, eider diving again, and at that moment half a dozen great black backs dropped into the melee. In a flurry of spray the ducklings were all taken. The eagle left with nothing. It had had to stay in the air. But black backs can land on water and did – and as the chicks bobbed up, as they had to, they were swallowed whole.

And we watched and marvelled and our excitement at seeing that king eider – rare in this part of the St Lawrence – was tempered by reality.