Zoe Lucas was a 21-year-old goldsmithing student, born and raised in Halifax, when she went to Sable Island for the first time in 1971. Since 1982, she has spent the majority of her time there, sleeping in a field camp and bringing in supplies by plane.
During that time she has kept track of the wild horse population, published research on shark predation of seals, studied marine litter, and collected research specimens for the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History, as well as helping raise money to bring experts to the island.
She has held a contract for the past 15 years with the offshore oil and gas industry, gathering data on bird corpses washed up on shore for their efforts to monitor environmental effects.
Lucas is currently staying at her apartment in Halifax, and she sat down to explain what it's like to be one of the few human representatives in a relatively untouched place.
Q: Tell me how you ended up on Sable Island.
A: It was an accident, kind of. I was a student at the art college, NSCAD, and I had a job working at Shearwater making boxed lunches, the pilots' boxed lunches. And I met somebody there who had lived and worked on Sable Island, and she brought in images and photographs, and we talked about it, and I became quite entranced with the island.
It took a while, but I was eventually able to get to the island. I volunteered to work as a cook and general assistant on a Dalhousie seal research project in 1974, and continued with that for a few years. Then I started working on terrain restoration programs, and then that led into doing some work on the horses. Every project led into two more projects. . . . And then I got the contract with the offshore energy industry, and that has allowed me to work on most of the other projects that aren't funded.
Q: How close do you get to the horses?
A: You can get very close to the horses, but you're not supposed to touch them. And it's easy to avoid bothering them because you can read their body language. I find that they're quite expressive.
One of the things that I do is I try to keep track of their body conditions. So I want to walk around the band, and look to see who's thin, and who's in good condition, see if there are any injuries, see if I can see if a mare's pregnant or not.
And because the horses are protected, have been protected for decades, there's no reason for them to fear people. You can make them nervous by misbehaving, but if you just behave yourself, and watch their body language, and don't disturb them, they'll basically — they might look at you, and then go back to grazing.
I don't spend a lot of time with any particular individual horse. And anybody who sort of behaves like I do will be as ignored as I am. I mean, it's a treasure, right? — to be around wild animals and have them ignore you. That's basically the ultimate experience: to have a wild animal not chase you, and not be afraid of you — that's perfect.
Q: Do you have a favourite memory, or something you always go back to, when you try to tell people . . . why you love it there?
A: Sometimes I get asked that question, and it's like your brain then kind of gets jammed, because there are so many things to think about, and then I can't say anything. But there have been some remarkable sights. I showed images (at a talk last week) of the morning glory cloud. When the first one that I saw passed over my head, that was just an astounding, astounding experience.
There have been some albino seals on Sable Island, grey seals, and they look kind of grungy on the beach. But one of them went into the water while I was there. And instead of swimming out to sea — it was a beautiful, sunny day — it started to swim parallel to me as I was moving along the beach.
I don't think it was following me; it just happened to be swimming in the surf along. And so it was wet, and the sun was shining on its coat. And the coat — I mean, it wasn't startling white, but it was close to white, and when it dove just below the surface, the sun was shining on it and beams, sunbeams, were actually shooting up out — you know, it was spectacular. It was the kind of thing that you could imagine, a thousand years ago, would have given rise to legends, mythologies.
Discovering a beetle that hadn't been recorded there before, that's very exciting, for me, anyway. It doesn't have to be as spectacular as a gleaming albino grey seal.
Q: What do you do for fun on Sable Island?
A: The work that I do is fun. And when I use the word 'work' to describe it, that's just because, sort of, people understand that word. It's an exploration, that's just what I want to do. I'm not paid for most of it, and if I wasn't paid for any of it, I'd still want to do it.
If I'm driving along the beach doing, say, the south side of the island (in a bird survey) and I encounter the corpse of a freshly beached whale washed ashore, well, I need to collect data from that specimen for the Nova Scotia Museum. It's not routine.
You're out on the dunes collecting information, and then to start looking at that, and transcribing notes out of field books, or working on a database — there's a lot of writing to do. I would say the time spent that seems most like work is actually writing reports.
I don't need to take time off, because I'm interested. It's fun. I'll go to the station and watch a movie — they have television there. And when I go to bed at night, I usually have a book that I read for an hour. But I really don't have any desire for a break.
Q: Do you ever miss living around more people?
A: No. (Laughs.)
( sross@herald.ca)
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