“Sable needs protection from the garbage and the pollution that get into the environment. Sable is as vulnerable as anywhere,” she says. Parks Canada enforces strict visitor limits and bio-security measures on the island, but even the best plans and intentions can’t prevent garbage, disease and warmer waters from arriving here.

Hiking around midday, I feel a twinge on my upper arm and look down to watch a mosquito sucking my blood. Strange, given I’ve been told there are no established populations of ticks, blackflies or mosquitoes on the island. Not anymore, it seems. Oblivious to the scientific implications, I smack it flat against my skin, Wile E. Coyote-style.

“There were more [mosquitoes] last year than I had ever seen before, and there’s more this year,” Lucas tells me, although it’s unknown whether mosqui- toes arrived here accidentally by ship or if there was always a small population that’s now growing due to milder seasons.

Heading north from the main station, we trudge, sand-weary, past hundreds of grey seals sunning themselves on the beach. Sable Island shelters the world’s largest breeding colony of grey seals, numbering around 320,000 during the January breeding season.

While scientists have long found influenza A in Sable Island’s grey seal population, says Medill, their understanding has been that, like humans, seals can largely survive the infection. However, in 2022, when a team tested a spate of dead grey seals in Quebec, they discovered that H5N1, a sub-strain of influenza A with a high frequency of outbreaks in wild and domestic birds, was behind the deaths. While they concluded the outbreak was limited, scientists on Sable are keeping a careful eye out for evidence otherwise.

When my 10-year-old son finds and holds aloft a bleached-white seal skull nearly as big as his own, I wonder what it died from. If a globally spreading disease, a designer perfume and mosquitoes can find their way to this remote “breezy sandbar,” as Lucas calls it, perhaps no place can be truly disconnected from the realities of our modern world.