Some experiments nobody designed as experiments end up teaching more than the ones that were planned. This one begins with a rich man buying an island and ends, a hundred and thirty years later, with one of the highest deer densities in the world and a forest that no longer regenerates.
01 An island bought whole
The island sits in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, separated from the rest of Quebec by two straits, and covers 7,953 square kilometres: larger than Crete, larger than Corsica. In 1895 it was sold for $125,000 to Henri Menier, a French chocolate manufacturer.
Menier did not buy it to exploit it, or not only. He built an entire village, Port-Menier, put up a cannery for fish and lobster and tried to make the timber, peat and minerals pay. Many of those houses are still standing.
But his main intention was another: to turn it into his private hunting ground. And for that he needed something the island did not have in sufficient quantity. Game.
02 Two hundred and twenty animals
Menier introduced several species that did not belong there, and among them a herd of 220 white-tailed deer. Two hundred and twenty animals on an island of nearly eight thousand square kilometres: on paper, a drop in the ocean.
They thrived. Today the population exceeds 160,000. To put the figure in perspective: the island also holds around 1,000 moose, meaning there are roughly a hundred and sixty deer for every moose.
03 What happens when there are no wolves
The underlying explanation is simple, which is exactly why it is so instructive: on the mainland, a deer population is limited by predators and by hard winters. On an island without wolves, the only brake left is food.
And a brake that depends on food does not act in time. The population grows while there is something to eat, keeps growing once it is starting to run short, and only stops when the resource is exhausted. By then the damage to the ecosystem is already done.
04 The forest that stopped regrowing
The most visible effect is at knee height. Deer eat shoots, shrubs and low plants, and where there are this many, the understorey disappears. What remains is a forest of trunks over bare ground, without the intermediate tangle that supports almost everything else.
It has been reported that black bears lived on the island before the releases and are no longer there, and the proposed explanation points to exactly that: the bear depends on berries to build reserves before winter, and the shrubs that produce them were browsed bare.
It is a three-step chain worth keeping in mind whenever introducing species comes up: someone releases a herbivore, the herbivore eats an entire layer of vegetation, and an animal with no relation to it at all is left without food.
05 The other reason to come
And here comes the twist. On 19 September 2023 the island was inscribed on the World Heritage List, but not for the deer or for the chocolate maker's village: for what is inside the stone.
According to UNESCO, the fossil record on this island is the most complete palaeontological testimony of the first mass extinction of animal life on a global scale, approximately 447 to 437 million years ago. The whole coastline is included, except the area around the village, plus the banks of two rivers and a strip one kilometre inland.
There is a symmetry that is hard to ignore. The same island holds the most complete archive of an extinction four hundred million years old and, on that same stone, an involuntary experiment in what happens when a balance is disturbed in little more than a century.
06 How to visit
It is not a place you pass through. You arrive by sea or by air, there is a single village, and the island is so large that moving around it requires planning ahead: five outfitters hold exclusive hunting and fishing rights over 7,263 square kilometres, almost the entire surface.
What you can do without being a hunter is what makes the place interesting: walking the river canyons, looking at the layered cliffs and searching for fossils in the limestone, which here are literally in plain sight. It is one of the few islands in the world where the ground reads like a book.
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