Big Meadow Bog: A Lost Backyard

Big Meadow Bog provided berries and game and medicinal plants for the first people, the Mi’kmaw, and continued to do so for the first settlers. Their livelihoods and island economy were based on the coastal fishery but the Meadow was part of life and tradition. Paths from the village of Westport ran the length of the Meadow leading to berry picking areas, pools with duck, and the beach at the south end of the wetland complex. The Meadow continued to function as a “commons” for people to harvest berries and hunt until it was ditched in 1958. The ditching lowered the water table and altered the ecosystem so that shrubs and brambles grew up making a barrier that separated the village from the Meadow. The bog vegetation was lost and the pools were drained. We argue that when the hydrology of a wetland is fundamentally altered, the traditional uses of that wetland by local people are also lost. The margin, the “lagg”, of Big Meadow Bog was a key habitat for the Endangered Eastern Mountain Avens, Geum peckii. Conservation concern and the recovery efforts aimed at this plant provided the rationale for the wetland restoration discussed throughout this book. This restoration effort and the boardwalk from the village into the bog have reconnected the village with this lost backyard and have renewed an appreciation of the Meadow and a sense of pride in its globally rare Avens.