Original subtitles

Geography of Solitude

You can come back here a couple of times and see if it's headed up.

Would you like a coffee or tea?

Can you hear the pipe outside?

There. This is the aviation forecast, and you can see that it's improving.

A row of lightning there with a few little spots, and this is what's moving

our direction.

The wind picking up to 35, diminishing to 25, 30.

There was supposed to be a flight today, a food flight. That's been canceled

because of the weather.

This is a tail end of the rain that we had this morning.

Why did you make this?

I just made it over the years.

Some of the crystals people gave me, but like that washed up on the beach.

A school, a class gave me that little medallion.

So I did a talk there and they gave that to me.

So, I'm not going to give you a straightforward talk about the natural

of Sable Island.

This is more about experiencing Sable.

I went to the island in 1971 for a very quick visit. I managed to get a free

seat on a flight going out with a journalist.

All I wanted to do was to see the horses.

I was very keen on horses. I was attending the art college. I had no

Sable Island otherwise.

And I knew nothing about it.

Initially, I just wanted to be there.

You know, just to be there.

I mean, it's so compelling being in a place where you're learning things

directly rather than reading about it in a book.

When I got to the island, it was the landscape that enthralled me. I'm

around, learning for myself, discovering for myself.

because that's what this whole Sable thing has been. It's been a process of

discovery.

Sable Island, 20 miles long, one mile wide, lies low in the North Atlantic,

about 100 miles off the coast of Nova Scotia.

After 1971, I was desperate to get back to Sable Island, so I managed to get a

job with a seal research group from Dalhousie University as a volunteer

Since I had a lot of time in between cooking, I started working with the

project, catching seals and trailing along behind Henry James, taking notes

he was taking compass bearings on the seal's tracks.

I would say that even now, after 40 years, and that's a total of about 9

days on Sable Island, when I'm out on the dunes or out on the beach doing

something, I still have these moments of like, that's incredible.

Found some slides that's been building this, you know, the life and times of

A -frame.

Henry James built it with a couple of crew. The reason it has a flat top is it

wasn't designed to be an A -frame. They ran out of wood.

Built for a three -year project, and it lasted 20.

This is where I started on C -11.

This is our contact microphone.

If you just hold this, it's going to record the sound within the world.

So within me.

Okay.

That's so cool.

I mean, this building is a ghost.

It's a figment of fragments of the past.

It's really the only structure on the island right now that's sort of

There's no batteries and scrap metal or anything like that. It's just wood.

mostly just wood kind of sinking into the dunes.

It's got all kinds of stories buried in there.

He's just looking at pictures of you.

Bonding with the apron.

Is it having a nap? No.

So your film is still in the backpack there.

Great.

How long can you leave film in moonlight?

In moonlight.

I mean, I'm just looking at how the grass is folded over like this. If you

some, you actually just laid something out under the grass and let the grass

itself be exposed with the moon shining through it. Just try this.

So in order to find the emulsion size, you put your lips on it.

And whichever side your lips stick to is the emulsion.

Okay.

What is this plate called? Pine tree rust.

And this will process into weed.

I was thinking we should pick a spot for burying film along the fence line.

That would be easy to find.

When I got to the island, one of the first projects I became involved in was

collecting horse manure, which could be used to measure parasite burdens in

horses, and it could be used to monitor pregnancy rates.

I calculated, based on the number of samples I collected over the 10 years

I worked on this, that I carried, over that time, about 6 ,000 pounds of horse

manure in my backpack in total.

And the other thing that I discovered is that it takes about four hours for a

Sable Island horse to produce a fresh sample.

If you come upon a group of horses who are snoozing, when they stand up,

almost all produce a fresh specimen.

So then I could sort of sit there and read a book and wait for them to stand

And then it was a bit of a panic because you wanted to know where each sample

was because I needed to know which horse it came from.

So I was actually recording the seeds that I could see in the dung,

seeds, seaweed, different types of grass, if I could tell the difference,

some interesting things every now and then, finding balloon ribbon in a pile

manure, indicating that the horse had eaten it.

The dung is alive.

Find them totally kind of scary.

I think maybe it's from being a kid and these things wandering around in

basements and things.

They're common.

Got a roe beetle, a sawbuck, a centipede, and an ant.

Our catch of the day.

Oh, look it. Here, here, here.

Oh, my God.

Oh, my gosh.

It may move, you may miss it, but there's a very interesting spider right

And I'm going to try to catch it.

Can you see the web?

Yeah.

It's just in there, hunkered down.

God, they're fast.

Can you see it?

That was a battle.

This is an incredible view. You can see both ends of the island right now. This

doesn't happen very often.

The ends of the spit.

And the ends of the spit in that direction.

What is the logic behind putting horses here?

It was just commonly done on offshore islands.

People would put sheep, cattle, horses.

Because there were no predators and you didn't need any fences, you could just

let them free -range and graze.

Or, in some cases, just forget about them.

Basically what happened with the horses, they were just left behind.

How have these numbers changed now?

Hugely.

Well, when I first started working here on the horses, the population ranged

from 150 to 250.

So now it's ranging from 450 to just over 500.

You saw my notebooks. I was keeping track of their markings on their faces

hair patterns, and that was the main way to identify them.

A spreadsheet is a step to a database. Basically, a spreadsheet is the easiest

way to enter a whole lot of data.

For instance, if I wanted to know all the horses who happened to be in that

location, I would then sort by column G.

Or I could sort by column G plus the date, so then I could see who was in

location earliest and latest.

This particular spreadsheet has got over 10 ,000 entries.

So it's quite full for a spreadsheet.

When the horses die, sometimes they will die on the beach where they get buried

by sand, sometimes more often in vegetated areas. And they get returned

island very quickly. All the extra nutrients going into the sand cause

bursts of vegetation.

What we have with this animal is we know where he was during his life from fall

to adulthood, what his social status was, what his reproductive record would

have been.

And then, of course, once they die, collect tissues, genetic tissues, and

So that kind of life history becomes incredibly valuable.

1, 2, 3, 4.

We know which guy this is.

It's not very common but this horse has had a hoof overgrowth condition

so you can see the toes are curled up.

I'll just come back with the scalpel and take a small tissue for the genetic

information.

This is roll 41.

35 millimeter buried in hemoglobin.

You see underneath it, all the flesh is gone, but there's loads of beetles and

flies.

Very active, busy under there, feeding.

And then birds can feed on those invertebrates. So it's a source of

food for beetles, for invertebrates, and birds for quite a while.

The horses stand here to get some shelter, and they also rub up against

twigs, the exposed underground roots and twigs, and they rub

back and forth, grooming their coats.

All the manure that they leave gives you this incredibly

thick growth.

We've got goldenrods for bees.

There's two over there, two there.

They're just moving around through here.

In a place like this.

The scent of the roses and the juniper.

Valley.

It's like going down into a lost valley.

And it becomes a coin.

Can you smell this?

That crazy smell? That's the arrow.

It's just a sea smell.

My favorite grass.

You can just crawl in amongst the stems

and listen for the wind blowing through the leaves.

Little things like this.

It's like seeing a sea, an ocean of green.

It moves like the waves.

I started collecting invertebrates for the invertebrate collection for museums.

Just focused on the Beatles and then got interested in all the invertebrates.

All the invertebrates get recorded in a spreadsheet.

Basically, when I'm actually working, I'm taking a GPS all the time on

everything.

All those jars on that counter are filled with things that I collected on

It's a wealth of specimens, but it's also a high rate of murdering

on Sable Island, which I do give some thought to.

During the last couple of years, we've found 70 additional invertebrates on

Sable Island.

Just because I've been paying attention to invertebrates, just when I've been

working on other things, and when I see something, I collect it.

It's fascinating that for such a small island that has been studied so much for

so long, that even as of this year, still finding things, species that have

overlooked, that haven't been recorded.

And the other thing that's quite exciting is that as we keep finding

like this, we're also going to start finding more endemic species, species

don't exist anywhere but on Stable Island.

Can you use those microphones to pick up bugs with noises and stuff? Yeah, yeah.

So the bug would have to touch the electrode. Yeah, okay.

When I was first on Stable Island, the graces were just up on the far eastern

end of the island.

And it started moving down onto the dunes, near the spit, and then

colonizing West Spit and the beaches on the north and south sides.

I mean, they produce over 50 ,000 pups, so that would be over 50 ,000 mature

females just to start with.

The birds are accumulated at the top of North Beach.

It's always nice to be in the study.

A great black -backed bill.

Intact, no injury, no oil.

I don't.

A different kind of bill.

A northern cat, a juvenile.

They have quite different colors.

These are adults, which are white with black hair.

Juvenile check.

Very dark green. Tiny white.

Stole the body that the practice that it's left with has to be

taken off the boots.

Because they would get mistakenly counted in the right survey.

Because they feed far at sea and they pick their food off the surface of the

ocean as seabirds, they're considered as a sentinel species.

They're very susceptible to picking up bits of plastic and swallowing them. So

continuing to monitor the stomach contents of these birds gives you an

trends in the ocean, of the amount of plastic that's polluting the global

So over a 22 -year period of 300 corpses that I collected, 72 % of them had

stomachs filled with plastic.

So 20 years ago, this whole area was a series of freshwater ponds

that stretched all the way through here.

And standing here, there would be a row of dunes out there, and you wouldn't be

able to see the ocean up here.

And I'm standing where there was freshwater at one time.

The island has been losing freshwater ponds for decades.

This is Pine Tree Pond West.

So there's a lot more vegetation.

You can see how trampled it is by the horses drinking here. All the holes

made by the cooks as they walk around and sort of churn up the bottom.

A horse water hole that right now is inactive, but since they haven't been

it recently, small plants have taken root and are growing.

But once they start using it again, they would paw at the sand and make it a

little deeper, and those plants would disappear.

Most of the horses on the island drink at water holes anyway.

So probably once these plants disappear, the horses will be fine, but it will

affect nesting ducks and shorebirds.

And all the pond invertebrates.

All the bugs and little fish should be gone.

And some freshwater plants.

This is actually not an unpleasant shore.

Kind of like knitting.

Kind of rewarding.

Whenever something's happening on the mainland, you can sort of tell by the

bundles of balloons that turn up.

Green and red and white for Christmas.

Red and white on Canada Day. Red, white, and blue on July 4th.

Orange and black on Halloween.

Easter is usually pastel colors.

These are the lips or the rings on the balloons.

Separate them and then count the number. That's the way to quantify how much

balloon debris is being found.

How long have you been doing this, the balloons?

I don't know. I guess 15 years.

There have been a couple with obituaries.

Some of them are at the boy or at the girl announcement.

Some are just greetings.

And political balloons.

But also ones from the state for county sheriff.

You know, vote liberal or...

liberal lie.

There's really not that kind of survey being done for these anywhere with the,

you know, the kind of detail that, you know, everything was separated and

measured, the mylar balloon, any information on the balloon.

The occasional letter, you know, and some interesting responses.

So that's all the balloon ribbon you collected in one year? Oh no, there'd be

couple bags like that.

The number of balloons we find on the islands have declined, probably not so

much because there's been a real understanding of how bad these things

because the cost of helium is increasing dramatically and it's becoming scarce,

and so not having helium is solving this problem for us.

But a couple of examples of some balloons that I found on Sable. This

came from Indiana.

And when I find any information, like a note or something attached to a balloon,

I'll usually write to the people who sent it, not nagging them about not

releasing balloons, but just giving them some background information so they can

conclude for themselves it wasn't a good idea.

This was a family that on Halloween night... in Lafayette, Indiana.

This family wrote their information on a disc. They attached it to a balloon

bundle. Just the one.

Just the one. It wasn't the whole release. It was just the one balloon,

disc. They let it go, and it ended up on Stable Island. It traveled over 2 ,000

miles. And that would be a straight line. That doesn't sort of account for

gyres and the twists that would have taken in the atmosphere. And that landed

Stable Island.

All kinds of garbage washes up on the beach on Sable.

And the plastic breaks up in smaller and smaller pieces.

I love fishing.

So they're all microplastics.

Those are nurdles.

Nurdles generally are virgin plastic. It gets shipped as a raw material for

manufacturing plastic items.

Sometimes they're being shipped and they're shipped in bales, like big bags,

like feed bags.

And if they get lost, because cargo is lost, then a lot of them would get into

the environment.

Nerdles have been a recognized problem since the 60s, so there are certainly

people paying attention to nerdles.

I separated them by color so that I could further separate them by use and

origin.

These are bits and pieces of like rope, but they break up into smaller and

smaller bits and filaments and whatnot.

So what I would do would be collect the water that's got these in it and then

just use my tweezers to pick them out.

Anything that slows the wind down so that it drops sand in an area can

the growth of new dunes.

Because the little clump of balloons is there, it slows down the wind and the

wind starts dropping the sand grain.

And that's how actually dunes are built by vegetation or by seaweed or by bits

of driftwood. So even a little bit of litter can do that. You can see all the

sand that's collected in there from the wind.

There's marine debris on the beach that's way too big to move, so they have

be inventory, photograph taken, estimate of size, just

documented and kept track of over the long term to see if they break up,

degrade, or move.

So with this thing, once it starts getting vegetated, it could develop into

dune as well.

I'd say maybe 10 % of it is exposed.

Probably some of it is still at sea from the bottom.

I mean, I would think maybe at least 20 years when it first appeared in the

islands.

Here, probably just a couple of years.

But right now, it's fairly dry.

Everything pivots around the new frames.

I decided to come back here to spend more time on the table.

The fact that it lasted so long wasn't a choice.

I mean, I really didn't, I didn't think it through.

It just, you know, just happened.

I mean, anything happening is this whole series of minor decisions that merge

one into the other and have no significance on their own, but they

and add up and end up in something going in one direction or another or multiple

directions.

This island today is a narrow, spittin' plain, a small, lonely world of seals

and wild horses and abandoned dwellings, often known as a graveyard of ships,

pounded and constantly reshaped by the surrounding seas, which a handful of

volunteers is trying to save from dispoliation and oblivion.

This island is 20 miles long.

And the restoration program has to be rather complicated because there are

few people to help.

So what are the most urgent matters to do in this restoration program?

Well, the first thing that we would try to do is, in areas such as this, we try

to prevent the salt water from washing over here too quickly so that it

increases the erosion and prevents vegetation from taking hold here.

Did you make a tent with vegetation?

Yes. Can you show me where? Down here.

This is a typical thing that the horses use.

Yeah.

So how do you protect them? I can't. There's nothing I can do about it.

I'm very, very impressed.

Tell me, do you love that island?

Certainly, yeah.

It's home, I suppose.

So this is a list of all the stuff that I found, all the items I found during

the cleanup.

So I have to find the labels for everything and make sure that it

this originated in Canada.

And if it didn't, then where?

So 111 items, only 17 of them originated clearly in the United States.

And then another eight originated beyond that. So Brazil, Japan, South Africa,

Haiti, Malaysia.

Russia, Cuba, and then a couple of Central America.

Doing brand audits are not that common yet, so the work on Stable will be new,

but it's not a new question to ask.

This is an important sampling site. Sable Island is an important platform

monitoring the health of the Northwest Atlantic and beyond because of its

location.

Marine litter is something that we started doing in the 1980s.

So you're looking at circulation, but also looking at what are the dominant

materials that are contributing plastics to the environment, how much of it is

fishing gear, how much is household use, how much is industrial, that sort of

thing. And the reason you want that information is to try to solve the

to find ways of reducing input and possibly even cleaning up. But reducing

is the big thing.

Yeah, so basically, I mean, you need the information to solve the problem.

The educational component is to reach out to people who aren't aware, who

haven't really thought about it, or have thought about it but aren't really

aware of how.

they might make changes.

And reinforcing the idea and the immediacy of the problem, the urgency of

problem for people who are aware of it. Everybody, we all are all using

plastics.

Why do you think it doesn't just come from within?

Why would you think it does?

Because they're destroying the planet. That is our only home.

I mean, kids

can understand and get it really quickly.

They're not out there with a job and, you know.

buying stuff for their family, et cetera, et cetera.

You start to lose connection with that when the reality of the world and the

planet gets a grip on you.

like this when i was 11 years old i

remember thinking about it when i was a child

living in a suburban area you know vacant lots just

wild messy places and i used to spend a lot of time in there in amongst the

trees and the shrubs and just living in my own world and then

you know they'd get plowed up, the house would be built, and they'd be gone.

And, I mean, it really did occur to me at that age that this is because there

are too many people.

There are too many of us, and we just kept destroying things.

That's all I had in my head. I didn't have any idea, any sort of education or

any background or anything, any thoughts about environment, ecology, or anything

like that.

I just made a connection between people and development and

what I thought of nature, which was, you know, just the greenery in a vacant

lot.

I feel claustrophobic and trapped when I start working with this stuff.

It's just a general feeling. It's not a specific feeling that the materials

themselves are affecting me, but just a sense of being in the ocean.

I just want people to have a sense of an ever -increasing problem with plastics

in the ocean.

Night Sable Island mist collecting on film and processed in

seaweed

Beautiful isn't it?

Yeah.

It appears that my life is still on.

That's all I ask, all I do.

All the time.

And do you want to stop?

to what's going on.

Because it's been really super rewarding and engaging since I'm going to be

here. But I lost track of some

notes.

Let's get this stuff back to Facebook.

Well, we could focus on getting down.

I don't really need to get down.

No, but it'd be nice to spend time.

17, 10,

10, and 5.

This is the last roll.

Your last roll of film?

Really? Yeah.

Are you feeling emotional because of the horse?

It's the best of life.

With the animals being able to go about their natural lives.

which includes dying and being recycled.

It's not unusual to find a corpse of a dead horse.

But as it decomposes, all the nutrients that made that horse, all the organic

materials become part of the ground.

And then the grass grows up around the corpse. New yarrow, new goldenrod.

And then you see a mare who's nursing a foal.

Wandering along, she stops to graze the grass next to the corpse.

And you see all those nutrients flowing from the dead horse

to the ground, to the mare, to the milk, to the foal, which grows up again

and then gets part of the whole system all over again.

And because we're here, breathing the air, occasionally eating a cranberry,

drinking the water, we're part of the whole.

flow, the ebb and flow of all the materials that

connect us all.