Kejimkujik

Kejimkujik covers some 404 km² in the interior of southern Nova Scotia and protects a well-preserved sample of the Acadian forest, an ecosystem particular to the Maritimes, along with a labyrinth of shallow lakes, rivers, marshes and bogs. Its name comes from the Mi'kmaq word kejimkuji'jk, "little fairies". To the inland section was added in 1985 the Kejimkujik Seaside, a stretch of pristine coast of some 22 km² on the south shore, with white sand beaches and rugged coastline.

It is the only Canadian national park that is also, in its entirety, a national historic site: it received that designation in 1995 for its Mi'kmaq cultural landscape. For millennia the canoe routes that cross the park connected the Bay of Fundy with the Atlantic coast, and the Mi'kmaq left behind hundreds of petroglyphs carved into the slate outcrops on the shore of Lake Kejimkujik, with hunting and fishing scenes, wildlife and elements of their traditional life; some, later than European contact, depict sailing ships and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century dress. They can be visited only on a guided walk. Scottish and Irish settlers moved into the area from the 1760s, and in the late nineteenth century well-off Boston families used it as a summer retreat.

The park's marshes, bogs and shallow lakes support more reptile and amphibian species than anywhere else in Atlantic Canada, with rarities such as the ribbon snake and Blanding's turtle. In the coastal sector the threatened piping plover breeds, alongside a notable population of waterbirds and seals. Kejimkujik is also designated a dark-sky preserve, one of the few in Canada, which has made it a regular destination for astronomical observation, and canoeing along the ancestral routes remains its most characteristic activity.