Resource to Recreation
(Excerpt from Saltscapes Magazine Aug/Sept 2024)
How a New Brunswick village turned an industrial wasteland into a sylvan refuge
The breeze off the water has an edge to it and I pause beside a stand of common reed along the marsh trail leading to the Petitcodiac River. They whiffle back and forth and I listen to their soothing music for a moment before climbing the riverside dyke towards two towering silos, leftovers from a gypsum industry that closed in the 1980s. The marsh wasn’t so quiet back then.
From this vantage, I look back towards the village of Hillsborough, N.B., tucked into the lee of the hills that inspired its name. A variety of landscapes stretch before me: patches of young forest, hay pastures and wildflower meadows, seas of greening cattails bordering a trio of shallow ponds. Habitat for geese and ducks, warblers and hawks, muskrats and beaver, coyote and fox — a diversity of wildlife that changes with the seasons. One spring, I walked here with a birder and he spotted 52 different species in an hour.
