A love letter to what lives here — written in full knowledge of what threatens it, and full of the particular joy that only a specific place can teach you.
In August, the chanterelles push through the duff at Arcadia Meadow's forest edge. The wild blueberries darken to blue-black in the south-facing meadows. The cranberries redden in the bog. A bald eagle hunts the channel with the unhurried confidence of a creature at the top of its food web. This is what the property gives you, if you're paying attention.
This abundance is real. It is also contingent. The browntail moth larvae are moving north. The hemlock woolly adelgid is coming. The bogs are under pressure. The fires of 2023 came close enough to change the way we think about what is permanent here. What lives on and around this property lives in conditions that are, quietly and measurably, changing. That is not a reason to look away. It is a reason to look more carefully — and to keep a record of what you see.
Foraging on the property is not a hobby. It is a way of knowing a specific place — of understanding its rhythms, its gifts, and its limits. These three are the signature treasures.
Vaccinium angustifolium
Smaller than anything in a grocery store and immeasurably more interesting. The property's exposed meadows and rocky barrens carry wild low-bush blueberry from July through August — the fruit intensely flavoured, sun-warm in the hand. Foraging them is slow, meditative, and addictive. The best are in the open south-facing meadows. Bring a container. Bring patience.
Cantharellus cibarius
The property's most prized foraging discovery. Golden, trumpet-shaped, smelling of apricot and earth — chanterelles appear in late summer at the edges where forest meets meadow, in the duff under balsam fir and birch. They are not rare here, if you know where to look. The knowing takes a season or two. Once you have it, you have it forever. This is what we mean by learning a place.
Vaccinium oxycoccos
Small, tart, brilliant — the bog cranberries that grow among the sphagnum are a different creature from any cultivated variety. Harvested in September and October, they require patience and wet feet and a willingness to move slowly through a bog that does not want to be hurried. The harvest rewards the effort with a berry that tastes like the distillation of a cold clear autumn day.
The Acadian forest is one of the most biologically rich temperate forest types in North America — a transition zone between boreal and deciduous, carrying the species of both. On the property, the forest is primarily balsam fir and black spruce at the exposed coastal edges, with red spruce, white birch, and sheltered hollows where yellow birch stands that may be two centuries old.
This is an old forest in the sense that matters most — not old-growth by most definitions (this land has been logged and settled and disturbed), but old in its ecological relationships. The mycorrhizal networks beneath the soil are ancient. The understory plants know their niches precisely. Walking through it slowly, you start to understand that you are moving through something that is, in a real sense, more intelligent than any single organism in it.
It is also a forest in transition. The climate conditions under which Acadian forests developed are changing faster than the forests can adapt. The particular vulnerability of balsam fir to changing moisture regimes, the northward creep of pests and pathogens that historically could not survive Nova Scotia winters — these are not distant threats. They are measurable in the forest on this property right now.
In May and June of 2023, Nova Scotia experienced the worst wildfire season in its recorded history. The Barrington Lake fire in Shelburne County burned more than 235,000 hectares — the largest fire ever recorded in the province. The smoke was visible from the island. The smell was unmistakable for weeks.
The island itself was not burned. But the fires changed something — they made visible a risk that forest scientists had been discussing for years in language too technical to break through into public consciousness. The Acadian forest is not a fire-adapted ecosystem. Its species evolved in conditions of high moisture and moderate fire risk. As Atlantic Canada warms and dries, those conditions are shifting. The 2023 fires were not an anomaly. They were a signal.
The property holds this experience as a kind of inheritance — not trauma, but information. The forest here is tended in part with fire risk in mind. Understanding the landscape's vulnerabilities is part of stewardship.
The threats are real, specific, and already present. Naming them honestly is part of what it means to love this place without illusion.
Euproctis chrysorrhoea — The browntail moth, historically confined to coastal Maine and a few Nova Scotia counties, is expanding its range northward as winters moderate. Its larvae carry toxic hairs that cause a rash similar to poison ivy in humans and can defoliate oak trees repeatedly, eventually killing them. The moth is already present in parts of Nova Scotia and represents a significant threat to the island's deciduous components.
Adelges tsugae — An invasive insect from Asia that has already devastated Eastern hemlock populations across much of the eastern United States. The adelgid historically could not survive Nova Scotia winters, but warming temperatures are opening a corridor northward. If it arrives, it would represent a catastrophic threat to hemlock populations — which, while not dominant on the island, are part of the forest's structural complexity.
Purple loosestrife in the wetlands. Japanese knotweed at disturbed edges. Common reed (Phragmites) advancing in coastal marshes. Each invasive species represents the homogenization of a once-distinctive landscape — the replacement of unique local ecology with generalist species that follow human disturbance anywhere in the world. Active removal is part of the property's stewardship work.
As temperatures increase and precipitation patterns change, the species composition of the Acadian forest is shifting. Balsam fir — the island's dominant canopy tree — is at particular risk from warming. Hardwood species from further south are moving north. The forest being tended today is not the forest that will exist here in fifty years. Adaptation means tending for a future that does not yet exist.
The bogs on and adjacent to the property are among its most ancient and most irreplaceable features. Bog formation begins in conditions of high moisture, low nutrient availability, and cool temperatures — conditions that have prevailed here for the ten thousand years since the last glaciation. The peat that has accumulated in that time represents an almost unimaginable density of stored carbon.
A bog is not a swamp. It is a self-sustaining, highly complex ecosystem built primarily by sphagnum moss, which creates conditions of high acidity and low oxygen that effectively pickle everything that falls into it. The vegetation of a bog — sundew, pitcher plants, cranberry, Labrador tea, black spruce — is exquisitely adapted to these conditions and cannot exist without them.
What threatens bogs is mostly what threatens subtlety: drainage, disturbance, warming temperatures, and the introduction of nutrients that break the chemical balance on which the whole system depends. Once a bog is damaged, it does not recover on any human timescale. The carbon it releases is simply gone — into the atmosphere, contributing to the warming that damaged the bog in the first place.
The property's mature bogs represent millennia of carbon storage. Bog drainage releases this carbon in years, not centuries.
From the property's meadows, headlands, and forest edges, the birding is remarkable. Bald eagles hunt the channel daily — they have recovered strongly from near-extirpation in the 1970s and are now simply part of the morning. Osprey nest on every suitable elevated structure within sight of the property. In May and August, warblers push through in numbers that make it impossible to walk the trails without stopping repeatedly.
The Ends of the Earth Meadow headland is the property's best birding spot — a coastal point that concentrates migrants and commands a view of the channel where loons, eider, and guillemot work the inshore waters year-round. Sit still and pay attention. This is one of the things the property teaches: that stillness is itself a form of activity.
The lobster boats at first light, the seals on the outer ledges, the porpoise in the channel on calm mornings — these are the coastal edges of the property's ecology. The data on what ocean warming is doing to this system is on the Bearing Witness page.
For a comprehensive ecology guide to McNutt's Island — marine life, intertidal surveys, the complete bird list, and the island's full natural history — visit the McNutt's Island Alliance.
mcnuttsisland.org →