Exploring My Atlantic Home

The heart of Sackville is its Waterfowl Park, a network of trails and boardwalks that was a blessing for fellow Sackvillians looking for a taste of nature at a respectable distance from others. Distancing is especially easy in the early day when the soft morning light brings a glow to the wetland.

Sackville sits at the head of the Bay of Fundy, where the farthest reach of the world’s highest tides have sculpted a landscape defined by productive salt marshes and extensive rich red mud flats that look especially nice in a hazy summer sunrise.

Hiking local coastlines, it’s hard not to admire the bedrock in the inner Bay of Fundy that consists of sandstones made up of sediments laid down more than 300 million years ago. Look closely to stones like this and you will see black fossilized plant fragments from the Carboniferous Era.

This day I was rewarded for getting up early to capture a soft sunrise over the saltmarsh at Baie Verte, New Brunswick. Known as Green Bay in English, this area is named for the colour of the summer saltmarsh and can easily be explored via the Trans Canada Trail that runs along its western edge.

Not far from Sackville are extensive mudflats that host huge flocks of shorebirds, or flings as they are collectively known. Most are semipalmated sandpipers which fly here directly from the Arctic. They stay just long enough to feast until they have gained enough fat to fuel the rest of their fall migration—a non-stop, three-day transoceanic flight to South America. Quite a spectacle!

The name Tintamarre was borrowed from Acadian settlers and translates roughly to "a raucous racket" that describes the joyful hullabaloo of their annual celebration of Acadian culture, which is not unlike the sound of thousands of ducks and geese that use these wetlands during migration.

Hopewell Rocks is an icon for the province of New Brunswick and is a place you can either choose to hike or paddle among these sandstone outcrops depending on water levels. It is hard to not be impressed by the life that thrives in this intertidal world washed by rising and falling tides twice each day.

Sable Island is a remote gem off of Nova Scotia and is dually protected as a Migratory Bird Sanctuary since 1977 and a National Park Reserve since 2013. The wild horses here are famous and seeing them is on many a bucket list but my draw to the island is its bigger wildness and remoteness.

L'Anse-Aux-Meadows is known by many as the location of the only known Viking settlement in North America, but it is also a thriving community. I found these shorebirds—one dunlin with a darker brown head amongst a grain (flock) of sanderlings—taking a break next to a wharf en route from their Arctic breeding grounds to the south for winter.

Fall in Gros Morne National Park, Newfoundland and Labrador, is truly a sight to behold. This view is from the Trout River Pond Trail.

Broad landscape images delight me but I try to stop and look at my feet now and then to take in the fine details in my surroundings. In this case, these harebells eeking out a living in a crack by the ocean in Cape Breton Highlands National Park were casting playful shadows that caught my eye.

Driftwood on the beach at Robinsons Island, Prince Edward Island National Park. I like these cool sunny autumn days where the golden hues and low angle of the sun makes for warm contrasts and textures.

I like to look for non-standard subjects at well-known and often-photographed places. This image of a monument was taken at the Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Site, just beside the famous reconstruction, looking across the harbour to the Louisbourg lighthouse.

A classic summer Maritimes scene with lupins, a common roadside plant, and a fishing boat, boat house, and wharf slightly obscured in the fog

There is nothing like the meditative benefits of looking out over the ocean. This soft morning sun was captured at Cape Smokey Provincial Park on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia.