Bird watching and Time in Nature along the Trans Canada Trail Across Quebec

“To learn something new, take the path that you took yesterday.”

John Burroughs
 

Three Journeys Across One Province

 

Quebec was the only province on our east-to-west journey across Canada that we did not experience as one continuous passage. Instead, circumstances divided it into three separate walks undertaken over three different years. We first entered from New Brunswick in November 2019 and followed Le Petit Témis toward Rivière-du-Loup as winter closed in. We returned in the fall of 2021 to continue from Baie-Saint-Paul through Charlevoix, along the St. Lawrence and across southern Quebec to Montréal. Finally, in the spring of 2022, we returned to Montréal and followed the Trans Canada Trail through the Laurentians, eventually turning south through Gatineau to the Ottawa River and Ontario.

 

At the time, that fragmentation of our plans and trek often felt frustrating. We wanted to walk Canada continuously from east to west, and Quebec repeatedly interrupted that simple idea. Yet looking back at the province through the lens of time, those interruptions gave us something that a single crossing could not have provided. We experienced Quebec in early winter, again during fall migration, and finally during the rush toward summer. The geography changed, but so did the season, the weather, the birds, and the amount of life surrounding us. The result was that instead of one impression of Quebec, we were given three.

 

Three Seasons on the Trail

 

Our first time in Quebec was a quiet and rushed trek. By the time we crossed the provincial boundary near Edmundston in November 2019, we had been walking in Canada almost continually since June and had watched an entire season change around us.  The birds that had accompanied us through Newfoundland and the Maritimes were increasingly absent, leaves had fallen from the trees, mornings were cold, and snow was beginning to reshape the trail. Le Petit Témis carried us through forests and along waterways toward Rivière-du-Loup, but this was not a landscape filled with obvious migration or prolonged bird song. Grouse bursting from cover, chickadees moving through the woods, woodpeckers knocking away, animal tracks, and the increasingly frozen landscape became more characteristic of those final days.

 

That experience gave us a baseline we did not recognize at the time. We were not seeing “Quebec birdlife” in any complete sense; we were seeing one small part of the province at one very particular moment of the year. The silence of the season was real, but it belonged to November. When we eventually returned, the contrast would make that obvious.

 

Our return to Quebec largely took place beside the St. Lawrence. Beginning at Baie-Saint-Paul in October 2021 (hikers are not allowed to trek Charlevoix from East to West, and so that section had to be set aside), we encountered a landscape still carrying autumn colour and a river filled with movement. The St. Lawrence became one of the defining natural features of this part of the province. Snow Geese gathered in extraordinary numbers, while ducks, gulls and Double-crested Cormorants were also part of what we spotted along the waterway. From camping sites and cabins high on the Sentier des Caps, we could hear geese calling from the river below in darkness, while farther along we stopped at observation areas near Cap Tourmente and watched the relationship between shore, marsh, river and birds while visiting one of the province’s key Important Bird Areas

 

Our third trek in Quebec was entirely different once again. Leaving Montréal in late May 2022, spring surrounded us. Wetlands beside the P’tit Train du Nord were busy with birds; wild turkeys and groundhogs appeared along the trail; dragonflies and other insects filled the warmer days; and farther north we spent hours among warblers and flycatchers. Snapping Turtles appeared near Mont-Tremblant, frogs crowded wet areas, deer became frequent farther north, and marshes near Lac-Saguay gave us one of our memorable bittern encounters. By the time we reached Gatineau Park, chipmunks, Wild Turkeys, birds and turtles were part of a landscape that seemed almost impossibly alive compared with the Quebec we had previously entered

 

The key, however, was not that the province had changed but that our timing had.

 

More Than the St. Lawrence

 

It would be easy to remember Quebec primarily through Charlevoix and along the St. Lawrence because of their scale. During our Charlevoix journey, it repeatedly dominated the horizon and gave us some of the province's most memorable moments in nature. Yet walking across Quebec also showed us how incomplete that image would be.

 

Away from the river, Quebec repeatedly changed around us. Le Petit Témis passed through forest and beside smaller rivers and lakes. The Sentier des Caps climbed into steep forested terrain where the St. Lawrence could disappear from view for hours. Beyond Montréal, the P’tit Train du Nord threaded through communities, around wetlands, lakes and forests before the landscape increasingly took on the rocky character of the Laurentians. Farther south again, rougher trail corridors carried us past marshes, farms and waterways before Gatineau Park returned us to dense urban park only kilometres from the national capital.

 

The character of the trail changed just as dramatically. Quebec gave us everything from rough mountainous footpaths to beautifully surfaced rail trails, to boardwalks through urban wetlands, to city cycling routes. Perhaps our strongest impressions of Quebec were simply how extensive and developed many of its trail systems were. The Sentier des Caps and the Route Verte represented two completely different forms of trail building, yet both became central to how we experienced Quebec on foot.

 

That variety also in turn changed how we birded. On the St. Lawrence we often looked outward across enormous spaces. In the Laurentians we were more likely to stop beside a marsh, listen along a wooded rail trail or watch a turtle at the edge of a lake. At other times, the most interesting observations occurred where we least expected them: a deer drinking beside an industrial area approaching Mont-Laurier, turtles sunning themselves nearby, or chickadees surrounding us on a trail through a populated community.

 

Birding While Walking

 

By the time we had completed our crossing of Quebec, we had become increasingly aware that birding while thru-hiking is very different from birding at a fixed destination. We rarely had the luxury of choosing the best hour of the day, waiting indefinitely for a particular species, or returning repeatedly to the same observation point. We walked through whatever conditions the day gave us, carrying everything we needed and usually with another twenty, thirty or forty kilometres still ahead.

 

That could mean passing through a promising wetland when rain was beginning, reaching a birding area after hours of difficult climbing, or hearing something interesting while our immediate concern was finding a place to sleep. Conversely, it could also mean unexpectedly having an entire morning to slow down because the trail was quiet, or we had reached a marsh with enough time to let the kilometres wait.

 

Quebec gave us many of those moments. Some of the best moments were not ones filled with rare birds but were experiences that happened because we were moving slowly through the landscape: hearing Snow Geese from our campsite on the Sentier des Caps, being awakened by songbirds before dawn, and being able to watch porcupines outside a refuge cabin. These were not interruptions to the hike - they were the heart of it.

 

The Importance of Season

 

Of all the lessons Quebec gave us, perhaps the clearest was the importance of season.

Had we crossed the entire province only in late 2019, we might have remembered Quebec as a place of open forests, frost, resident birds and snow. Had our only experience been the fall of 2021, we might instead have remembered the enormous movement of Snow Geese and other birds along the St. Lawrence. Had we arrived only in the spring of 2022, our strongest impression might have been warblers, flycatchers, frogs, turtles, insects and the intensity of spring. Instead, despite our attitude at times, we were fortunate to have experienced all three.

 

All of which made it impossible to think of a landscape as something fixed. The same woods that seemed almost empty in late autumn could be noisy with life in spring. Waterways that appeared still at one time of year could become gathering places for birds at another. 

 

Quebec Through #Hike4Birds

 

Quebec also reinforced why we had chosen to walk across Canada as #Hike4Birds rather than simply treating birds as something we pursued at particular destinations. Some of the province's best-known birding landscapes were certainly worthwhile, and the concentration of birds along the St. Lawrence was unforgettable. But our experience of Quebec as a whole was much broader than visits to recognized birding sites.

 

We found nature beside highways and subdivisions. We found it along abandoned railway corridors and beside golf courses. We found it in marshes surrounded by farms, in municipal green spaces, near industrial facilities and in forests only a short distance from Montréal, Mont-Laurier, Gatineau and Ottawa. The Trans Canada Trail repeatedly carried us between these places without requiring us to decide that one was “nature” and another was not.

 

That notion matters a great deal to us. One of the ideas that had increasingly shaped our walk was that meaningful encounters with nature do not require reaching a remote wilderness. Quebec demonstrated that particularly well. A boardwalk through a wetland in Laval, a marsh beside a rail trail, a river running past a community, or a patch of forest within Gatineau Park could all provide opportunities to stop, notice and reconnect.  Sometimes those places held spectacular concentrations of birds. Sometimes they held a single turtle, or gave way to the call of a Winter Wren.

 

Completing Quebec

 

When we finally crossed the Ottawa River recently, there was an unusual sense of completion. Most provincial boundaries on our journey had been crossed once: we entered, walked across the region, and eventually stepped into the next one. Quebec had resisted that pattern completely.  Instead, it took a number of separate journeys to traverse different parts of the province at three very different moments in the year.  Because of this, what initially felt like a fragmented way to experience Quebec ultimately became one of the things that made the province distinctive within our larger journey.

 

And so, after three years and three separate hiking journeys, we have finally stepped into Ontario knowing that Quebec had shown us something our continuous crossings elsewhere could not: sometimes returning to a landscape is the only way to discover how much of it you missed the first time.

 

See you on the trail — with your binoculars!