periodic damage to the crops of the inhabitants, a mouse with which the vole was compared, and the flying squirrel, presumably because of its unusual mode of travel.

The records also indicate that even the more comprehensive of the recorders (La Ronde, Roma and Franquet) missed out some of the larger and/or more useful animals from their individual lists. La Ronde (1721), for example, omitted the bear, though it must have occurred at the time. However in compensation, he is the only recorder to list animals that were absent from the island — presumably species that he expected to occur due to their presence elsewhere in Acadia and on Cape Breton Island. Why there should have been no moose on the island, as he records, is not easy to determine, since they appear to have been common on the mainland“. And whether the absence of the beaver and the porcupine was, as he speculates, due to the lack of suitable habitat (lakes for the beaver, mountains for the porcupine) is open to question. Rather, a factor for the beaver may have been the limited occurrence on the island of their preferred food tree, the trembling aspen (see Appendix 1, p. 139).

Biogeographical aspects — The mammalian fauna recorded by the French recorders is virtually the same as that of the adjacent mainland, though it is slightly poorer in species due to the notable absence of the moose, porcupine and beaver.35 In biogeographical terms the island’s fauna is entirely a boreal one (despite the absence of the above three key boreal elements), signalled in the records by the presence of the caribou, lynx, marten, and snowshoe hare“. Other mammals recorded (the black bear, wolf, red fox, otter, mink and muskrat) are also animals quite at home in the boreal forest zone, though they also occur widely in more southerly areas as well.37 Concomitantly, there is a total absence from the island of mammals characteristic of the more southerly nemoral or

3‘ For example see Denys (1672) (reprinted in Ganong 1908, pp. 382-83, 384, 575, 576, 595-597.)

35 See Cameron (1958) for a comparison of the fauna of the island with that of the adjacent mainland.

3" Plus the red squirrel and the weasel, which although

undoubtedly present, were not recorded in French period documents.

3’ Hall 1981.

151

deciduous forest zone (e.g. the striped skunk, racoon, grey squirrel and white-tailed deer). If Denys is to be relied upon, none of these seem to have been present in the rest of Acadia in the seventeenth century38 — though in the last two centuries such southerly species have reached the adjacent mainland and some have even been introduced to the island.39

The predominance on the island of what is entirely a boreal mammalian fauna is of interest given that the greater part of the island was covered not by boreal coniferous forest but by upland hardwood forest akin to the more southerly ‘northern hardwoods’“. We may thus wonder whether within the island itself there was an uneven distribution of the mammalian fauna, with the more coniferous eastern and western parts of the island favoured by the fauna, over the hardwood areas of the central part of the island — though in the absence of their more southerly mammalian competitors, there could have been what is known as ’competitive release’, i.e. the expansion of the island’s boreal fauna into niches that would have been occupied by their nemoral competitors, had they been present.

Food-chains and food-webs — The trophic or food- chain relationships of the recorded mammalian fauna of the island is schematically shown in Figure 2—1. With the exception of the caribou, all of the herbivores were what are termed 'small mammals’ (the snowshoe hare, muskrat, squirrels, mice and voles). These herbivores supported five mammalian carnivores, three of which we may presume would have been largely prey specialists: the wolf, feeding mostly on the caribou, the lynx on the snowshoe hare, and the mink on the muskrat. (The sixth carnivore, the otter, is an aquatic predator feeding on fish and other aquatic organisms — probably in both marine and freshwater ecosystems on the island.) Undoubtedly all three of these specialists must on occasion have also taken other prey, such as hares, voles and other small rodents — as well as birds. In doing so they would have come into competition with the island’s two more generalist

3” Denys 1672 (reprinted in Ganong 1908 , pp. 382-89, 575-78.)

39 Le. the striped skunk and the racoon. There were also several failed attempts to introduce the white-tailed deer (see Cameron

1958, pp. 52-53).

‘0 See Sobey and Glen (1999).