Troubling signs of climate change are showing up on Nova Scotia’s remote Sable Island

“It’s beautiful, it’s wild. It’s warm, it’s cold. It’s frustrating, it’s happy. It’s so many things all at the same time,” says Fred Stillman, owner of Kattuk Expeditions, one of the island’s three contracted tourism providers. He’s been visiting Sable since it opened to tourists in 2017. “It’s real life functioning as it’s meant to, without any rose-coloured glasses.”

Lacy clouds span a Dutch-blue sky as the sun sparkles off a shallow, brackish pond on the island’s edge. Within it swims a filefish, about the length of a human hand with mottled white, brown and olive skin. It’s gorgeous but worrying: as our climate warms, pulses of warm subtropical ocean carry rarely seen fish, including filefish, butterfly-fish and triggerfish, towards the chilly North Atlantic.

limate change may also be affecting the island’s population of Ipswich sparrows, which nest exclusively on Sable in summer. “Normally they migrate from the island back to New England,” says Sarah Medill, operations coordinator for Sable Island National Park Reserve. But increasingly, on wintertime walks, she’s finding little populations of the sparrows hiding in high vegetation, the birds opting to brave milder winters instead of migrating south. 

No one is more intimately familiar with these subtle changes than Zoe Lucas, a naturalist and researcher who has worked on the island for 40 years. When I first meet her, Lucas is in her shed, surrounded by the detritus of one of her many projects: a multi-year study on the wide array of plastic that washes ashore. A bucket brims with mismatched Crocs below a clear garbage bag full of discarded curling ribbons. Lucas passes around an aggressively pink box of Gucci Rush perfume — when she first discovered it, she accidentally pumped its nozzle, spraying perfume on herself — along with a basketball from China, likely lost overboard by sailors shooting hoops and blown here by the whipping winds.