Anticosti Island

Anticosti is about two hundred and twenty kilometres long with roughly two hundred residents and something like one hundred and sixty thousand white-tailed deer, introduced by the French chocolate manufacturer Henri Menier who bought the island in 1895 and released two hundred and twenty of them. The deer have since eaten out the understorey and reshaped the forest. In 2023 UNESCO listed the island for its fossil record: the limestone cliffs and river canyons hold the most complete record anywhere of the Ordovician-Silurian extinction, the first of the five great mass extinctions, around four hundred and forty-seven million years ago.

History

For thousands of years Anticosti was a hunting ground of Indigenous peoples from the mainland, and Jacques Cartier sailed along its shore in 1534. In 1680 Louis XIV granted it to Louis Jolliet, who built a fort and settled here with his family in 1681; his heirs held it until 1763, when it passed to Britain, and after belonging in turn to Newfoundland and Lower Canada it became part of Quebec at Confederation in 1867. In 1895 the French chocolate maker Henri Menier bought the island for $125,000, built the village of Port-Menier and turned the island into a private game reserve, releasing a herd of 220 white-tailed deer whose descendants now number more than 160,000; his brother Gaston sold it in 1926 to the Wayagamack Pulp and Paper Company, and for five decades it was used almost only for forestry (Wikipedia, Anticosti Island).

The landscape

• The fossil cliffs - the world's best record of the first mass extinction.
• The deer - around 160,000 on an island with about 200 people.
• Vauréal Falls - a seventy-six metre fall in a canyon.
• The shipwrecks - remains of some four hundred wrecks around the coast.

When to go

June to September; access is by air or supply ship and winter is essentially closed to visitors. Deer hunting season in autumn is the island's main economy and books out.

What to expect

Getting there is expensive and weather-dependent. Roads on the island are gravel and a four-wheel drive is usually needed. Services are minimal and mostly tied to hunting outfitters.

Nearby

The Mingan Archipelago lies north; Sept-Îles is on the mainland.

Key facts