With Lynn and Louise we undertook a peregrination of 300 million years—give or take—to the
gypsum bluffs of Big Harbour. That is how long ago the bluffs began taking shape in the
departed Windsor Sea. Nova Scotia produces more gypsum for manufacturers of drywall and
other products than the other provinces combined. Big Harbour’s gypsum formations are
spectacular enough in their own right but our principal lure was one of gypsum’s living
beneficiaries—
Cypripedium parviflorum, better known by its common name, yellow ladyslipper.
The latter half of June is prime blooming time for this gorgeous orchid. My old departed friend
Dave Stirling liked to go on about spectacles of nature. He never got to see it but I have no doubt
that Dave would agree that the June ladyslipper show at Big Harbour is just that—a spectacle of
nature.
Our timing was fortuitous. We arrived in time to see not several blooms, not dozens, but many
hundreds, perhaps a thousand or so all together on a finger of land we speculate is the remnant of
a man-made jetty once used to ship gypsum from Big Harbour to whatever industrial plants were
keen to have it. On a sunny morning, in a fresh breeze, we were spared the tribulation of
blackflies and mosquitoes. Conditions were such that, had I ability to declare it on my own
authority, the little land finger and its surroundings might be a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
But that of course would draw unwanted legions of people. As usual at Big Harbour we had the
place entirely to ourselves over the six hours of our stay.
Ladyslippers were not the only attraction. En route to the orchids, the Old Big Harbour Road
crosses a wetland, where we savoured a close encounter with leopard frog and a gang of “avid
mud-puddlers” jostling for position in the same puddle, swallowtail butterflies—Canadian Tiger
Swallowtails to be precise, Papilo canadensis, perhaps the best known of our butterflies due to
its size and distinctive multi-coloured pattern.
Sharing the same ground as the ladyslippers, it was hard to resist contemplating the span of time
that has elapsed since the gypsum cliffs were formed. Three hundred million years is enough to
swallow four million human lifetimes, a fact that for someone of my bent leads to conclusions
about the significance of a person’s lifespan in the great scheme of things. But let’s set that aside
for now.
Whenever a fellow delivers himself into wildflower country, he is very likely to encounter birds
too. I am now immersed in one of the vicissitudes of advancing senescence. Once upon a time
Jan dubbed me the world’s laziest birder because I did most of my birding by ear. The libel no
longer applies. My high-end hearing is much eroded. I no longer hear warblers, kinglets and
other high-register species. Jan has a solution—Merlin, the magical ‘app’ that identifies bird
vocalizations for me. Merlin works well enough as long as I hear enough of a snippet to know a
bird is present. Birds are less accommodating than flowers: as the photographer readies his
camera to take a shot, the bird decides to fly away. It is easy to imagine that the behaviour is
intentional. I did manage a decent shot of a single bird, yellow-bellied flycatcher, and counted
myself lucky.
With our collective eyes and ears and a little help from Merlin, we managed to list 33 bird
species for the day. The best of them was the last. I was able to hear and ID it without Merlin’s
help. It was a Cape Breton rarity, Sora, a kind of rail. It conveniently vocalized just as we
returned to the car. In the most recent Maritime breeding bird atlas there was only one place in
all of Cape Breton where soras were known to have bred—Big Harbour.
Days later I still savour the Big Harbour afterglow. Among the cabin’s considerable natural
history volumes there are a few dedicated to the region’s geology. I peruse them to enhance my
appreciation of Big Harbour’s ancient history, and in the hope of finding another.
