As a kid growing up in a rural part of Ontario’s Ottawa Valley, Robin Johnston spent quite a bit of time “just kind of mucking around” in the nearby woods and farm fields. “That gave me a basis for being curious about the natural world and wanting to be outdoors,” she says.

She moved to Nova Scotia ten years ago to work on a farm. “I farmed for quite a long time, and part of the appeal was being able to be outside for large parts of the day,” explains Robin. Drawn particularly to the ocean, she settled on the South Shore about eight years ago.

When she decided to stop farming in 2022, she took a year off and spent time on Vancouver Island, where she participated in conservation activities with local organizations. She had been aware of conservation happening in Nova Scotia, but her experience with land trusts in BC inspired her to get involved back home. She became a Property Guardian in 2022 and was assigned to monitor the Nature Trust’s protected lands at Barren Meadow, nearby to where she lives.

Normally when the Nature Trust talks about Barren Meadow, it’s a story about turtles – this part of southwest Nova Scotia is one of several key areas of the province identified by researchers as critical for turtle conservation. But for Robin, the appeal of stewarding Barren Meadow was more about building a relationship with land close to her home. “Turtles are cool, I like turtles,” she laughs, “but I was just happy to go wherever you needed somebody. I think people feel very strongly about the place they actually live. The more people you have out there with eyes on the ground, who are engaged, the more they could make a positive difference in the place where they live.”

With the heavy rains last summer, it took Robin a bit of time to get onto the property, but one day on the drive home from Kejimkujik she decided to stop in to get a sense of the location. “It’s an interesting place, because there’s the woods road, and then it goes through a wetland. There are old logging roads, but the only way you can get over the water is to walk over a beaver dam – you have to be ready to get your feet wet.” When she came back a week later to do a more in-depth monitoring visit, she discovered some serious stewardship issues that had not been present the week before. After completing her monitoring, she reported back to the Nature Trust stewardship team, who coordinated the cleanup of the situation Robin had found and asked her to put up a few signs on the property.

When Robin returned to put up the signs, hunting season had begun. Wearing blaze orange for safety, she put one sign at the property line and the other sign where she had discovered the previous issue. “Then I thought I’d do just a little walk, so I walked in and before I reached the beaver dam, there was an empty bait bag tied to a tree,” she describes. “I thought, ‘Well this is weird.’ I crossed the water and went up one of the paths. Someone had cut a bunch of trees on one side of the path! Not like firewood, but just slashing trees at shoulder height. I took some pictures and walked further, and there was a bait pile in the middle of the path, so I decided to leave since someone was obviously hunting deer there. The cut trees were probably to make a sight line to the bait pile, to have a clear shot.”

“My next mission will be to go back and see if there’s a blind,” says Robin. If so, the Nature Trust has given her a letter to leave for the hunter, to explain that the land is protected for conservation and hunting blinds are not permitted. “There’s a bit of a plot now! What am I going to find the next time I go!? Every property is different, but I’ve only been there twice in a year and clearly that’s been useful. It feels validating.”

“When I first got involved I was a little unclear about how to start, or how to approach going out,” she continues. “I appreciate that it’s left up to you to figure out what works for you, but I wasn’t sure – how often should I go? Should I go to all of the photo points? What am I getting myself into? But on my property, there’s enough of a trail and I’m comfortable enough with google maps that it feels more accessible than I would have thought it would.” Robin hopes that by building her own regular relationship with the land, “hopefully other people will see that it’s being cared for, and respect that.”

“I live in a rural area. There are little roads everywhere, and it’s neat to find out what’s down at least one of them. Even just having access to the maps is really interesting to me. That’s a road I’ve driven up and down a whole bunch of times, and I have that moment of thinking, ‘Oh there’s not much going on in that area’ – that western thought that comes in first. And then you realize, No – a lot of it has been cut over, and it’s wet, but it’s actually turtle habitat. I didn’t know that before I started being a Property Guardian.”

Please join us in thanking Robin for her stewardship of Barren Meadow!