The United States does not need to annex Canada. Canada is already here. On any day of the year, species of birds that do not nest in Massachusetts, but north of us in Canada, can be found here. During spring and fall avian migrations, some of these species alight here in abundance as they move between Canadian nesting grounds and more southerly non-breeding grounds.
Many of these birds fly across a body of water often called the “Gulf of Maine,” the part of the Atlantic Ocean that extends west from a line between Nova Scotia and Cape Cod. Other migrants — whales, fish, seals, and other marine life — also move through this gulf.
Millennia ago, another kind of migration moved across this gulf as glacial ice carried bits of ground-up bedrock — boulders, pebbles, sand — southward from what is now Canada into what is now New England. To get an idea of what New England might have looked like as the ice moved through, go to a hilltop on a morning when the valleys are filled with fog, giving a glacial appearance to the landscape (although at the peak of glaciation the ice covered the hilltops, too). A visit to a sand or gravel pit can reveal the legacy of deposition by the ice sheet, including material from far to our north. Much of this legacy is being lost as these deposits are mined to feed driveways, cement structures, and other construction or landscaping uses.
Dip a pan into the sediment of a New England stream and swirl it around. If you turn up a few flakes of gold, you might have discovered a bit of treasure eroded from a local source or remnants carried from much further north by the glaciers. Large areas of the New England landscape consist of material gathered in the north country and transported far from its origins.
Cape Cod and nearby islands are what’s left, at least until rising sea levels sweep them away the material dumped by the glaciers at their southern end. The beach sand there that attracts vacationers to our area each summer is part of what might be considered the ice’s garbage dump. Similarly, large pebbles smoothed by the ocean and rolled onto rockier beaches are the debris from the glacial mining of Canadian bedrock. At locations where the underlying bedrock is fairly uniform, the varied colors and patterns of the beach pebbles reveal their foreign sources.
Most of the birds, welcome sparks of color and song flying across the body of water between Nova Scotia and Cape Cod, nest in Canada. Many of the sand grains and pebbles (more color variety for those of us who look down as well as up) that line the gulf come from bedrock of what is today Canada, as does much of the land marking the gulf’s southern border. Thus, those who think that gulfs should be named for the country on the northern edge of the water may be doubly justified in renaming the “Gulf of Maine” the “Gulf of Canada.” The birds, sand, whales, pebbles, or fish, though, are unlikely to pay attention to what any person calls this or any gulf.
David Spector (he/him) is a retired biologist and former board president of the Hitchcock Center for the Environment. Earth Matters has been a project of the Hitchcock Center for the Environment since 2009. HCE’s mission is to educate and to inspire action for a healthy planet. Our Living Building and trails are open to all at 845 West St. in Amherst. To learn more, visit hitchcockcenter.org.
