For Sarah Hudgins, a love of nature runs in the family. “Our parents instilled that in us,” she explains. “Growing up, we were always out hiking, canoeing, swimming, snowshoeing.” When the family moved to the suburbs of Halifax, Sarah remembers, none of her new friends had ever encountered snowshoe tracks and were impressed to see them appear around the baseball field near their new home. “Out in nature was the happy place to be.”

Her love of nature drove her through school; she completed her honours thesis on the medicinal plants of Atlantic Canada. But it was just one of several things close to her heart, and her path changed direction, albeit one informed by her love of botany: she became a doctor. “I had always wanted to be a teacher, and I’m now teaching medicine,” she says. “I’ve always wanted to make a difference and help people in really difficult situations.” She spent two years in Angola working as a doctor for a humanitarian aid organization, returning to Canada in 2017. She now works in Cape Breton as an Obstetrician Gynecologist.

Reflecting on what she has noticed coming back to Nova Scotia, Sarah says, “I’ve had the incredible privilege of exploring so many wild places, [and] you learn to see and appreciate things differently.” In Angola’s dry season, for example, she recalls feeling “just literally dry – we don’t recognize how precious water is when you live someplace like Nova Scotia with lakes and rivers everywhere, until you move someplace where it doesn’t rain for six months.” For Sarah, Angola – a country heavily affected by human-driven environmental impacts – was also a stark visual aid in understanding the importance of ecosystem management. “We only have one earth, you know? We’re supposed to be stewarding it because we can’t survive without it. Yes, we do need to grow food to eat, but if we don’t take care of the land around us, what do we have left?”

Fortunately, a passion for environmental stewardship also runs in the family: Sarah’s sister Joanna joined the Nature Trust in 2019. At that time the staff was much smaller; now Joanna leads the stewardship team as Land Stewardship Manager. Although Sarah wasn’t officially a volunteer, “I went along with Joanna on some of her trips, to spend time in nature with Joanna because we love being in nature and we love hanging out.” They hiked to remote Lowland Cove just after that land was protected so that Joanna could do the baseline survey, and kayaked to islands well off the south shore, including Cape Negro Island and several of the Tusket Islands.

When another friend told Sarah that she was going to sign up and officially get trained as a Property Guardian, Sarah decided to make it official, too. They become two of our first Wilderness Property Guardians in the Cape Breton area. Sarah monitors one property in the Mabou Highlands, timing her visits with the rural medical clinics she does in the area. She also generously makes herself available to be dispatched by the Nature Trust to other places as needed, which has taken her hiking (carefully) into surreal karst topography, battling heavy wind along the Bras d’Or shoreline, exploring evidence of old human settlements on now-protected lands, and on many kayaking adventures.

“Being out in nature is so different from my day job that it is incredibly refreshing. Nobody is dying, nobody is crying or kicking me or swearing at me, and I get to see these incredible places of beauty,” Sarah says. “Yes, it’s volunteering and it’s stewardship but it’s also an opportunity to explore different ecosystems and landscapes that I’ve never explored before. I never would have known about those places without the Nature Trust opportunities.”

And as a doctor, she adds, “I think it’s healthier for us as people to find something different to join in with that instills a sense of joy in us. It gives you a different perspective
when you go back to your day job.” (The different perspective can sometimes be as
straightforward as the difference in meaning of the acronym “DNR” for her – Do Not
Resuscitate – and for her sister – Department of Natural Resources.)

Her path is a good reminder that nature-lovers can be found in every walk of life. She explains, “Sometimes the people who are nature-minded only hang out with the people who they see as nature-minded. They might not see somebody like me, a healthcare provider, who actually loves nature and finds it such a joy to be involved in something so different. To volunteer you don’t need a botany degree, you need a love of nature and to be able to pitch in and do something.”