A Container of Medical Supplies to Uganda

In 2013 Dr. Christine Dranzoa, whose remarkable history I have blogged about a few times, wrote to ask me if I knew anything about an organization in Hamilton, Ontario who were able to send medical supplies Uganda.  

An artist's plan of what the new university campus will look like

  

Christine talks to the builders

The nursing station under construction

She was in the throes of organizing the construction of a nursing station as part of the new university in her home district of West Nile at the town of Aura. She has been appointed vice-chancellor of the university and the recently sent me a photo of the early construction of the station.

It took but a moment to realize that we in Saskatchewan could surely do something without going further afield. After all we have a long history of philanthropic activity. It was time to put on my Sherlock Homes costume, the deer-stalker headgear (minus the meerschaum pipe and the cape) and see what I could find out.  

It did not take long. I started out by contacting Dr. Pammla Petrucka, a nursing PhD based in Regina who has had a great deal of experience is this sort of activity.

Those exchanges eventually led me to Mr. Lindsay Brucks, who heads up the Saskatoon branch of the organization Canadian Food for the Hungry. He has shipped 295 such containers to many countries, including Uganda and its neighbours Sudan and Southern Sudan. He in turn contacted Diane Larivee who volunteers with Regina Qu'Appelle Health Region and she too got involved

I had two other essential tasks. I soon found out that it would cost about twenty-five thousand dollars to ship from Saskatoon to Arua.  It was easy to contact all the students who had accompanied my wife Jo and me to Uganda in the eight years up to my retirement from the Western College of Veterinary Medicine . The students quickly bought into the idea and we soon had enough money to cover most of the costs. The funds were deposited with the Hospitals of Regina Foundation under the watchful eye of Nora Yeats. 

Our program involved in a study of the complex relationship between wildlife, humans and their livestock. The rotation lasted a month each year and we all learned a great deal. Without Christine, who had been head of the Department of Wildlife and Animal Resource Management at the Makerere University College of Veterinary Medicine at the time the rotation would never have taken place.

The other task was to find out from Christine more about her exact needs. She quickly designated one of medical staff to send me a list. At the last minute she wondered if we could help with a supply of mosquito nets which are so essential in that environment. For this part of the project I contacted our neighbour’s son who is a first year medical student. He invited me to tell his class-mates about Christine and before I knew it we had $468.51 in my hat. That went directly to Uganda as nets purchased there would be a great deal cheaper than any we might find here (about 10% of the cost).

Books for Uganda

Lindsay lost no time in finding everything that Christine needed, and a whole lot more. Jo and I made a bunch of phone calls and were soon given about eighty fairly modern textbooks on nursing and medicine by her former colleagues. The folks at the WCVM and St. Paul’s Hospital gave us seven excellent microscopes.

We then went to visit Lindsay at his warehouse when the container was two-thirds full. We were astonished at the quantity and variety of equipment ready to ship to any destination.

 

There were whole rows of wheelchairs, crutches, beds, a baby incubator and an ultrasound machine and anything else you can imagine.    
 

The full container on Sept 15th 2014

The container was soon full and is now on its way to Kampala where it is has to clear customs. With any luck it should reach Arua by Christmas. Wouldn’t that make a great Christmas present?

Ready to roll!

The Toda of South India: Culture and Medicinal Plants

In 1955 Joanne Van de Riet was a bright inquisitive teenager who was fascinated with the world around her. Two of her major hobbies were painting and flower pressing.  When an anthropologist visited the family home in the South Indian town of Ootacamund (Ooty) she was offered a chance to visit some nearby Toda people who lived in small communities called munds near the town.

During that visit Joanne collected and pressed as many plants as she could, particularly medicinal ones. She then sketched them.

After that she visited the school library and found the taxonomic name of each plant. Three lines of writing accompany each sketch: the taxonomic name, in most cases the Tamil name (in script) and the plant’s use. 

  

 All the sketches were scanned in 2013 by our daughter Karen and posted to a website  devoted to endangered languages. I have repeated the scan with only two examples here as the lettering might be difficult to read on the endangered languages site.

         According to Wikipedia the Toda people are a small pastoral community who live on the isolated Nilgiri plateau of Southern India.

Much of the Wiki information is accurate, but not all of it. Many of the old practises have been abandoned under the constant pressure of modernization.

At one time the Toda did indeed practice fraternal polyandry with one woman marrying all the brothers of another family. Missing from the Wiki report is that all the offspring of this relationship were deemed to be children of the oldest bother.  Furthermore female infanticide, which is now illegal was once routine. Polyandry has largely been abandoned.

Another remarkable fact is that the men were so dominant in society that a morning greeting involved the wife kneeling with head bowed so that the men could place a foot on her head. 

Kneeling wife and dominant husband in a morning greeting

The accompanying artwork by an unknown artist, possibly a Toda man, was made at least 70 years ago and is still in the possession of the Van de Riet family. It is a 3D piece, which does not show in the photo. It was sculpted of raw and probably unfired clay that has been coloured and has a somewhat abstract appearance.

There is also a theory that the Toda, who are very much taller and robust in stature than any other peoples of South India, are descendants of men who deserted from Alexander The Great’s army. His campaign, which only took place in Northern India began in 326 BC and ended at his death in 321. There is also an account that I have tried to verify of a visit by Greek nobility, perhaps even King Paul I or his brother George to the area in the 1940s.

As the Wiki site states the Toda built their faith around the water buffalo. According to the Todas, the goddess Teikirshy and her brother first created the sacred buffalo and then the first Toda man. The first Toda woman was created from the right rib of the first Toda man. The Toda religion also forbids them from walking across bridges, rivers must be crossed on foot, or swimming and they can't wear any shoes at all.

Toda dogie

There are interesting pictures of the dwellings, called dogies, of the Toda on the Wiki site, including a series showing how they are constructed. This photo taken in 1984 shows one such hut.

In recognition of the huts there is a concrete replica at one of the main crossroads, known as Charing Cross, in Ooty. The name is presumably a relic of former colonial days when The Nilgiri mountains (aka Nilgiri Hills or Blue Mountains) in South India was one of two hill stations much loved by the British as a place to escape the heat. When we visited the town in 1984 our taxi driver had no inkling of how to find the village and so Jo had to guide him. 

Modern home and three women

However not all the villagers used these dwellings. As the accompanying photo shows some of these huts have been replaced, at least in the community we visited in 1984 by concrete buildings more like modern ones seen all over the world. 

The other feature that is clearly visible in the photo is the long black hair of the women that is set in ringlets.

However the Wiki site has it wrong on the matter of the temples. It states that Toda temples are constructed in a circular pit lined with stones and are quite similar in appearance and construction to Toda huts. The temples only resemble the dwellings in that the upper parts above the rock base are constructed of bamboo bound with rattan and have thatched roofs.  The Wiki site also makes no mention of the fact that women were not allowed to enter the temples or even go into the pit.

Toda temple surrounded by pit

The accompanying photo, taken in 1984, shows a temple that only remotely resembles a dwelling. It does indeed have pit around it, as well as a heavy stone against the tiny door. The temple also acts as the storage place for the buffalo milk. The building may only be entered by the priest. No female may even touch a buffalo and it is only the men who milk them that may do so.

Temple door and rock

 A quote from Sir George James Frazer’s Golden Bough (1922) gives an insight into the position of the priest.

…the holy milkman, who acts as priest of the sacred dairy, is subject to a variety of irksome and burdensome restrictions during the whole time of his incumbency, which may last many years. Thus he must live at the sacred dairy and may never visit his home or any ordinary village. He must be celibate; if he is married he must leave his wife. On no account may any ordinary person touch the holy milkman or the holy dairy; such a touch would so defile his holiness that he would forfeit his office.

The photos of alleged temple and dwelling in the Wiki piece are oddly similar and are both of a home, again with a tiny door that is said to be a means of protection from wild animals. In older times this may well have been true, but decimation of wild mammal populations, a feature by no means limited to India, has no doubt reduced the risk from tigers, bears, panthers and dhole packs the much feared and voracious wild dog of the sub-continent.

Another factor led to changes in agricultural practices for the Toda. It was the wide-spread planting of exotic trees well suited to the mountain climate. There were eucalyptus forests, the trees originally imported from Australia. Joanne remembers that its gum was a useful mosquito repellent. The gum was prepared by piling up a huge mass of leaves and then starting a very slow fire underneath so that the oils dripped into pan. Some gardens were even surrounded by these trees on purpose. Another exotic tree, mimosa, was also grown in the area. It was a vital part of the film industry before the advent of digital technology.

Indian elephant in Sri Lanka - The Good and the Bad.

 In 2010 my wife, her sister and I visited Sri Lanka as tourists and soon found ourselves going to many temples and Stupas around the country. Inevitably we also ended up at places where we saw animals. In some ways the most interesting was the elephant orphanage at Pinnawala where we saw many rescued elephants and their offspring.

  

I learned a few interesting facts from the Wikipedia document about the sanctuary. The Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage was first established by the Sri Lankan Department of Wildlife Conservation in 1975 for feeding and providing care and sanctuary to orphaned baby elephants that were found in the wild. The orphanage was first located at the Wilpattu National Park, then shifted to the tourist complex at Bentota and then to the Dehiwala Zoo. From the Zoo it was shifted to Pinnawala village on a 25-acre (10 ha) coconut plantation adjacent to the Maha Oya River.

We were intrigued and impressed by some of the things they were doing. Perhaps the most impressive of all was the care and attention devoted to the big blind bull named Raja.

A  nice spray in the heat of the day

another trunk rest

Here he is being sprayed down. Note the way he is resting his trunk on one of his large tusks.He later switched sides for another rest.

Traffic hold up

The elephants are taken for a daily bath to the Maha Oya river that lies a couple of hundred metres from the front gate of the sanctuary. To reach the river they have to cross a main road and while the procession marches the traffic is held up.

An individual bath. ? Heaven?

 

 There are a few interesting YouTube videos of the bathing. Here is one such 7 minute version posted by “Jonsy Boy”.

Some the elephants at the sanctuary arrived as a consequence of the long war that finally resulted in the subjugation of the Tamil minority who mostly live in the north of the country.  

Sama and her problems

  

One such victim was a female, named Sama, who lost her front right leg to a land mine. She can still walk but inevitably her gait is slow and she has a huge upward curve to her spine and twisted left front leg, presumably to shift the weight to her hind legs and thatc one forelimb.

Sama is last to cross, but she makes it!

However she joins the river-bound group for her daily bath.         

Breeding sucess

The program at the orphanage inevitably involves breeding (there are several males younger that Raja, so biology 101 kicks in. This general scene show the results of such activity and is back grounded by the coconut plantation where the herd was finally located.  

  More from the wiki site. The first birth at Pinnawala was in 1984, Sukumalee, a female was born to Vijaya and Kumar who were aged 21 and 20 years respectively at the time. The males Vijaya and Neela and females Kumari, Anusha, Mathalie and Komali have since then parented several baby elephants. More than twenty-three elephants were born from 1984 to 1991. In 1998 there were fourteen births at Pinnawala, eight males and six females, with one second generation birth in early 1998. Since then till early 2012, 84 more were born at Pinnawala.

            What we did not know at the time of our visit, and was of course not told us was the ugly story of what happens to the results of all that successful breeding over the years. Again a quote from the Wiki site. Quality of care of elephants who are donated or sold away from Pinnawala has been a big public issue. In 2012 The Sri Lanka Environment Trust spoke out against authorities who continue to 'donate' tamed elephants to people who had 'poor' past records of taking care of animals. "There are enough cases to show that the authorities are releasing elephants from Pinnawala to the same group of people who don't take care of the animals." Though officials boast that the animals are under close surveillance, they don't do any monitoring once an elephant is released to a private owner.

Those interested in the conservation of elephants are well aware the most of the Facebook posts and attention are devoted to the African elephant which is undergoing massive destruction across the continent as the price of ivory spirals almost of control mainly going to China. Paula Kahumbu of Kenya has been a very active in the anti-poaching campaign and you can easily find her many posts on Facebook. I have a few posts in this blog series about the ivory trade.

There have been a few posts about the Chinese end of the marketing chain, but I have a suspicion that the authorities in that country have no concern about this issue and with so many ivory carving factories there they may even be actively encouraging it.

Will Raja and his huge tusks fall victim to that greed?  Nasty thought, but it will come as no surprise if he does. The price of ivory has risen four-fold in four years. Tempting.

A Storytelling Gig

I have just been sent a poster that describes a gig I have upcoming in Halfax Nova Scotia. This event will be in supprt of the Hope For Wildlife Society and I plan to share a few stories from my days in Africa, not just from the time I lived there, but a few research activities and more recent trips with students. This is the poster as it appears on the Storyteller of Canda - Conteurs du Canada website.

Here are a few of the pictures I may use.

My 1st wildlife patient was a giraffe

 

My 2nd wildlife patient was a white rhino

 

My 3rd wildlife patient. A constipated rhino

Bottle feedig a baby rhino

An alarmed rhino

Part of a hippo folk tale

Another part of that hippo folk tale

An elephant project in Rwanda

 

Equator Primary School, Uganda. A registered AIDS orhpanage.

An Unusual Hippo Case

-->

It has been a couple of months since I posted to this blog. This was not by intention but due to unexpected, and un-wished for events in my life that seem to have been resolved. This post takes me back thirty six and a half years to an unusual “consult” that I got involved in.   

§§§§§§§§

The most unusual case I have ever dealt with came not from the Forestry Farm zoo where I did the veterinary work as part of my duties at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine, but after a 1978 January Monday morning call from Calgary. 

         “Hello Dr. Haigh, this is Greg Tarry from the Calgary Zoo. We met in the fall two years ago when you came to work with Dr. Bim Hopf on that elk we got from Banff.” I at once saw in my mind’s eye a dark-haired slim man who towered over my six feet. Dr. Hopf had been the zoo veterinarian at that time.

“What can I do for you?” I asked.

         “We have a problem. Our hippo Foggy needs some attention and Dr. Hopf is no longer here. Foggy’s canine teeth do not meet properly. The lower one on the left has not worn as it should. It has grown so long that it cuts into the inside of his upper lip and he has quit eating. He can’t even close his mouth properly and the lip has a big nasty looking ulcer on the inside. The ulcer is bleeding. We think the tooth needs cutting off, but of course we can’t do that without sedating him. Can you get here and see if you can do anything please?” 

“I guess his canines are not wearing each other down as per normal,” I replied. “Of course I’ll come – I assume you will cover my expenses.”

I was able to get away the next morning, but before that I headed to the well-stocked vet college library to put on my thinking cap about the “how to” and dig into the scientific literature to see what I could find. My results were not encouraging. Three reports mentioned a variety of drugs but all cautioned that this was a species that is difficult to deal with. If they are in water the difficulty is greatly increased because they are likely to drown as the drugs take effect. One even mentioned the use of a road grader to be driven into the water to push the patient out on to dry land before it becomes fully immobilized. Another suggested the drug fentanyl with which I was very familiar. I had that drug in my lock-up safe. I had immobilized over a hundred rhino with it and a few dozen young elephants, dozens of African antelopes and quite a number of Canadian animals. In almost all of those cases I had used a well-known sedative to enhance the effects of the fentanyl. This fellow weighed half as much again as my rhino patients at something over two tonnes, so I adjusted the dose accordingly. 

The other important tip was that long needles are essential.

No report mentioned anything about teeth and that would prove to be as interesting as the drug issue.

         The flight to Calgary was uneventful and I soon found myself looking over a high wall at the hippo, which had been locked out of his pool and was standing quietly in a passage between his daytime and night quarters and mouthing but not munching on some lettuce. A stout steel gate confined him at either end of the passage. 

         My first worry had been dealt with. The patient was not going to be able to get to water at any time until we deemed it safe. Next we descended and went to the front of his pen so that I could see his mouth. This was not so successful, even with the aid of a flashlight, but the keepers assured me that he needed help and I would find his left canine tooth embedded in his upper lip.

         After my blowgun system failed because the dart simply bounced off his hide as if was a tractor tire I had to work out an alternative. 

Two bulls duke it out.

          

Given hippos’ fearsome reputation for aggression I certainly was not going to stick my arm through the cage bars to give a hand-held injection.

My wife and I had witnessed this temperament when paddling on the Zambezi. Before we set out our whiplash thin guide, named Christmas, admonished us to follow him carefully to avoid the home territory of a known bad-tempered bull. 

   

Hippos can bite. Not good if you are in the canoe!

To emphasize this he then took us past a canoe lying on the bank that did not look exactly sound. Two jagged holes, each at least half a metre long, had been ripped through the hull on one side. Christmas explained, “One of my guests did not listen to me and went too close to a bull we know is bad. The bull came up out of the water and bit the canoe. The man was very lucky. The teeth went through the boat and missed his leg which was between those two big teeth.” We had not needed a second warning.

         For my challenging patient I rigged up a syringe with a four-inch needle at its business end and attached it to the end of a broom handle. I taped it in place with some duct tape, then climbed back up to get a bird’s eye view of him. With a single thrust I pushed the jab stick directly down into the back of his neck just right of centre.

         Five minutes later I was at the front of the passage, where Foggy had obligingly dropped to his haunches close to the stout bars. It took only a moment to lift his lip and see the ugly infected mess in his mouth and the spreading inflammation that readily explained his lack of appetite. 

         Because the bull remained somewhat aggressive, we waited ten minutes. I realized that he was not going to become fully anaesthetised but was sufficiently sedated that we could proceed as long as we got a rope onto his head to control him. All seemed well, so I asked the keepers to fill up another big syringe with penicillin, which we stuck into his shoulder region, again using a long needle.

       I began to saw his tooth.

Angle grinders had not yet been invented. If they had, it would have been the work of a few short moments to chop off the top few inches of the offending tooth. In anticipation of the task ahead I had packed a flexible wire used by veterinarians all over the world when they have to do emergency obstetrical work to cut up a dead calf that is stuck in a cow’s body. 

The Gigli saw was named after its inventor, Italian obstetrician Leonardo Gigli, to make bone cutting easy.  The Gigli was also carried by British secret agents during WWII. Its main feature is the very rough surface, a bit like a coarse file, that allows it to cut through bone quickly and efficiently—a great asset when doing amputations.

         Dr. Gigli had surely never tried to amputate a hippo tooth and I only just managed it. I used up the whole roll of wire, all three metres of it. A few strokes back and forth and the wire broke, naturally right in the middle where it had been grinding on the tooth. This left two short pieces that I could not use. I quickly discovered that hippo tooth is the hardest substance I had ever worked on. Thirty-six years later it still is. 

         Eventually, by using ever-shorter pieces of wire, and holding the ends in my hands, rather than attaching them to the handles that come with the equipment and require extra lengths for attachment, I was able to get the job done. It took almost an hour. 

         All along I had been trying to keep an eye on his breathing to see if my anaesthesia was working properly. I did not want him to wake up prematurely or or perhaps to not wake up ever again. One of Greg’s staff helped me by calling out the breathing rate and writing it down on the medical record every now and again. Those papers I had read in the vet college library had not filled me with enormous confidence.

There was one more potential problem. The scientific articles had all warned that veins are difficult to find due to the layers of fat all over a hippo’s body.  Either luck or instinct kicked in because the first place I tested was his foreleg just below the bend of his elbow. That is the spot where nurses and doctors, whether of humans or animals, have drawn blood from me and millions of other patients.  I located a nice fat vein, as big around as a ballpoint pen. It was an easy hit.

A minute after the antidote began to circulate in his body the hippo was standing and seemed none the worse for wear.

         We agreed to keep Foggy out of his pool overnight and I headed home on the evening flight. 

         Dr. Doug Whiteside who very kindly sent me medical records to refresh my memory, confirmed that after this event the zoo staff took the very wise step of training Foggy to come to the cage bars to trade goodies for good behaviour —in the form of lettuce and other favourite foods. This enabled them to spend a few minutes every day gently grinding down the other lower incisor tooth that threatened to create the same problem. This was surely a much more elegant and risk-free approach.

         Foggy lived on until 2010 when the zoo staff took the reluctant but humane step of euthanatizing him because his advanced arthritis no longer responded to treatment. He was 47 years old when he died.

Sable Island - Graveyard of the Atlantic

This is the first part of a new chapter in my book From Polar Bears to Porcupines. In 1978 I traveled to Sable Island off Canada's east coast to start a research program on seals.

§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§

The beauty of working as a half-time zoo veterinarian was that it gave me the opportunity to pursue the free-ranging wildlife side of my university post. It gave me, as it were, some free rein.

Apart from the amazing opportunity to get involved in moose research with Bob Stewart and his team I had had to make most of the overtures myself. When a call came in from Ottawa and the man identified himself as Dr. Harry Rowsell I was at first confused. He quickly put me at ease by telling me that he had been a member of our own faculty as a pathologist and was now working in the medical school in the national’s capital in the same capacity. He named several of my colleagues who worked downstairs and referred to my interest in wildlife. From there he quickly segued into an interesting pitch.

“I am the current chair of the Canadian Council on Animal Welfare and for this year, while the actual chair is on sabbatical I am also the chair of the Committee on Seals and Sealing, handily known as COSS.”

Of course I was at once interested, if a little puzzled as to the reason for the call. I half mumbled an Mh-Hh.

 He went on. “Would you be free to join me and Mr. Tom Hughes from the Ontario SPCA on a trip to Sable Island to find out how we can help with some seal research?”

You can no doubt imagine my very enthusiastic reply, although I did warn Dr. Rowsell that I had never worked with seals. I did not tell him that I had hardly ever seen one and that I had no idea where Sable Island was. 

The basic need centred around the fact that the summer grounds of the hooded seals that pupped near the Magdalen Islands were unknown and the COSS folks wanted to know more about their ecology and lives in order to protect them. It was known that they pupped and bred in spring in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, but where they got to after that was a complete mystery. 

          The plan, as Dr. Rowsell outlined, was to go to Sable Island and test systems on the grey seals that have their pups on the sandy beaches there. If we could develop a good technique then we could apply that to the hooded seals. The critical factor was the date for our trip. It had to take place in the very short period between Christmas and early February when the seals would be on land. They would either be about to pup, feeding a newborn, or breeding.  As soon as the pups were weaned and the males had done their thing the seals would be back out to sea and feeding on fish. The narrow window had everything to do with the remarkable life style of the pups. They weigh about 15 kg at birth and for the next three or four weeks they put on weight at a furious rate as they suckle five or six time a day for up to ten minutes. The milk is rich in fat and by a month or so they have at least tripled their weight! As soon as the pups are weaned the adults get on with propagating the next generation.

          The flights from Saskatoon to the east coast were uneventful and as we had all met at the Toronto airport I had a chance to get to know Dr. Rowsell, or Harry as he insisted I call him, a little better.  He was one of the most charming and gentlemanly people I have ever met and we shared a common interest in many things related to the environment and conservation.  Tom Hughes was a bluff Yorkshireman and we shared a common bond as my parents had lived near the City of York for four years after my dad retired from the Highland Light Infantry and learned the ropes as a salesman for King George IV whisky, a Distillers Company Ltd product. My first student job had involved injecting gelatin into pork pies in a factory right opposite the Rowntree’s chocolate headquarters on the northern edge of the city. 

          After an overnight stay in Halifax we headed to the airport and I was astonished to see that we were to travel to Sable Island in a three-engine plane known as the Trislander. The engines are not where you might think. There are one on each wing and the third is near the rear on a rocket-like projection just in front of the tail. The island part of the name refers to the Isle of Wight off England’s south coast. My amazement took me back many years in a flash to family connections. Both of my grandmothers had lived on the IOW for many years. Granny Haigh had moved there from Scotland after her husband, my naval captain grandpa, had died. My Wall grandparents moved to the town of Cowes where granddad, a naval architect and a naval engineer (a rare combination) lived out the last ten years of his life. The two grannies lived half an hour apart by road, but when I was a lad that was too far to go on the island’s narrow twisting roads for just one meal. It had to be lunch and tea or tea and supper. The Trislander had been developed in the town of Ventnor on the island’s southern coast a mere half-hour drive from either grannie.  

          The pilot explained that the big advantage over other aircraft was that the plane could both land and take off in a very short distance which was a good thing because Sable Island did not have an airstrip and we would have to put down on the northern beach at low tide. This gave us a narrow window for arrival. We had almost 250 km to go and conversation, other than at high volume, was not really an option. I drifted off into snooze and woke when we began our descent.

Seals dot the beach just left of centre at left.

         I was too late to take a snap of the whole island, which seemed to stretch in a long lazy curve a long way to the east. I later learned that it is about 40 km long, but beneath me all I could see was a stretch of sand with what I assumed to be seals dotted along it.

          A taciturn elderly staff member picked us up from the beach and drove a short distance in a battered old Ford half-ton to the main station. He explained that the island had been continuously occupied since 1801 and was now principally a government weather station. Part of his attitude was probably due to the fact that he was one of the last people to have been born on the island. I suspect that he resented our presence and did not like what he may have seen coming in the way of a tourist invasion.

          Sable Island only became a National Park in 2013, thirty-five years after my visit. Before that it had been a rescue station for mariners (which it still is), a Coast Guard Station and had the dubious distinction of having two light houses, one at each extremity of its long crescent, because its other name is The Graveyard of the Atlantic.  There have been at least 350 shipwrecks there so the name is well earned.      

          One consequence of those many wrecks, especially ones in the days of the sailing ships was the establishment of a thriving population of horses. As we had arrived at midday there was no chance to get to work right away so I took the chance for a late afternoon walk over the dunes beyond the buildings. I soon saw the descendants of those unfortunate beasts. Whatever the horses had looked like when they left Europe they were now ponies.  They were all much of a size and almost uniform in colour, from dark to light brown.   

        I saw them in procession along the beach and closer up, as they had no fear of man. In late February their heavy winter coats made them look scruffy, but smart was not what they needed to be. Warm and windproof was the order of the day as the winter gales swept in from the open Atlantic.