Some conservation stories begin with a large government project; others begin quietly with one person deciding a piece of land is worth conserving. The narrative of a small island in the estuary of the St Lawrence River in Quebec is very much of the second kind, and it took the better part of four decades for its entire significance to become obvious.
Get breaking news anytime, anywhere. Download the TOI app now!
Île aux Pommes is a small island in the middle estuary of the St. Lawrence River, near Saint-Éloi in Quebec's Bas-Saint-Laurent region. The protected reserve covers about 23.53 hectares and includes the main island along with nearby islets and tidal flats. The island had been a popular summer getaway and breeding site for the region’s common eider ducks for many years and was held by the Déry family since Gaston Déry’s grandfather bought it in 1927. By the 1950s, the ecological balance had shifted. Tens of thousands of gulls and several thousand cormorants occupied the island, their droppings degrading the vegetation while gulls preyed on eider eggs and ducklings.
Buy the problem to remedy it
In November 1980, Gaston Déry, 28, bought the island from his father with one clear intention. He was a trained forestry engineer and had spent the last two summers looking at the damage close-up. He thought the degradation could be reversed if someone was willing to put in the work. Déry had visited repeatedly in 1979 and 1980. According to the Société de protection et d'aménagement de l'Île aux Pommes , Déry's repeated visits during the summers of 1979 and 1980 allowed him to assess the damage and develop a plan to restore suitable habitat for eider ducks.
What followed was slow, hands-on work, not dramatic work. Déry worked with Ducks Unlimited Canada and the Canadian Wildlife Service to set controlled burns to get rid of the heavily degraded vegetation affected by decades of seabird guano, then brought in dirt to cover the empty depressions left behind. In their place were planted shrubs designed for the harsh coastal climate, providing the female eiders with the low dense cover they require to hide their eggs from predators. None of it was an overnight success, and Déry has said the endeavour very much took the next 40 years of his life.
An island slowly came back to its birds
The perseverance paid off not instantly but slowly. As the restored shrubland matured, the number of eider ducks on Île aux Pommes grew year after year, reaching over 3,000 nesting pairs by 2019, a remarkable recovery for an island where nesting habitat had become severely degraded. As the flora on the island stabilised, a greater variety of seabirds, including eiders, returned, transforming a severely degraded habitat into a productive nesting area.
Déry supported the comeback with rules that went way beyond simple habitat repair. Pesticides and non-native plant species are banned outright, rainwater on the island is collected and utilised sparingly and the family home itself is run on solar power. In 2004, Quebec formally recognized the Île-aux-Pommes reserve as a private protected area in perpetuity. The announcement by the Quebec Ministry of Environment listed the newly designated conservation sites, including Île aux Pommes, which was declared the very first privately owned nature reserve in the maritime estuary of the St Lawrence and given permanent legal protection under the province’s Natural Heritage Conservation Act.
Recognition that stretched much beyond the island
Because Île aux Pommes remains closed to the general public for the sake of the nesting birds, most people will only ever see it through the work of the researchers and journalists who occasionally grant access, including biologists studying the estuary’s eider colonies and camera crews from Radio Canada’s long-running series La Semaine Verte. Déry's conservation work was formally recognised in 2018, when he was appointed to the Order of Canada for his contributions to the biodiversity and protection of the St. Lawrence estuary, including the revitalisation and conservation of Île aux Pommes.
