What the Wild Horses of Sable Island Taught Me

Some places you visit once and carry with you forever.

Sable Island is one of those places. I've been lucky enough to visit twice — in the summers of 2023 and 2024 — and I'm still not sure I've fully processed either trip.

Getting There

The first thing to understand about Sable Island is that it doesn't let you in easily.

My first trip was rescheduled six times over the course of that summer. Wind. Rain. Fog. The weather has to be nearly perfect to fly in by helicopter, and Sable Island is not known for cooperating. By the seventh attempt, I had stopped getting my hopes up — and then suddenly, we were going.

Both trips were organized through Kattuk Expeditions, arriving by helicopter from the mainland — about an hour over open ocean before the island finally appears below you, a narrow crescent of sand and dune rising out of the Atlantic.

Each time I went with a small group of four or five people, all strangers at the start of the day. The kind of people who end up on a trip like this tend to be artists, photographers, naturalists — people drawn to wild and quietly extraordinary things. Some of them I still follow online.

One in particular, Michelle Grant — a painter from out west whose work has been featured at Spruce Meadows and the Calgary Stampede — is someone whose art I genuinely love and whose company that day I won't forget.

We had roughly five hours on the island. Arrived around ten in the morning, departed by three.

Five hours doesn't sound like much. It was everything.

Two Trips, Two Completely Different Islands

The two visits couldn't have been more different photographically.

The first trip was overcast — soft, moody light that wrapped around everything gently. As a photographer it was almost ideal. The clouds did the work of diffusing the harsh sun and the island felt quietly dramatic, the kind of atmosphere that suits wild horses perfectly.

The second trip was blazing sunshine. Beautiful in its own way, but incredibly difficult to shoot in. High contrast, hard shadows, light bouncing off sand in every direction.

Counterintuitively I saw far more horses on that second visit — but capturing them the way I wanted to was so much harder. It's a humbling reminder that in nature photography, you don't get to control the conditions. You just work with what you're given.

Moving Out of the Way

One of the things nobody tells you about photographing the Sable Island horses is that you have to keep track of where they're going — at all times.

The horses move freely across the island along worn paths through the dunes, and if a horse is heading in your direction from twenty metres away it can be genuinely difficult to read their intention until they're closer than you'd like. The rule is simple: move well out of their way, and do it early. These are wild animals living their lives on their terms. You are the visitor. That dynamic shapes everything about how you move and how you shoot.

There's something about that relationship — having to yield, having to wait, having to be patient and unobtrusive — that I think comes through in the images. You can't push a wild horse into a better angle. You just have to be ready when the moment arrives.

Twenty Minutes on the Beach with Zoe Lucas

On my first trip, as the afternoon wound down and our departure time approached, I made a decision.

Instead of spending my last twenty minutes chasing one more photograph, I walked down to the beach, sat in the sand, and watched the seals.

Zoe Lucas joined me.

If you don't know Zoe, she is one of the most remarkable people connected to Sable Island — a naturalist who has spent over forty years on and around the island researching everything from the horses to oiled seabirds to the marine debris that washes ashore from all corners of the world. At the time of my visit she was focused on the litter that collects on Sable's beaches — objects that had travelled thousands of miles across the ocean to end up there, each one carrying its own quiet story.

Sitting with her one on one, just talking, watching the seals move in and out of the water — it was one of those moments I knew I'd carry with me for a long time. She's the kind of person who makes you see the place differently just by being in her presence.

What I Discovered About My Own Photography

I have never thought of myself as a nature photographer.

My work is rooted in the equestrian world — horse and rider partnerships, show rings, the quiet moments between rounds. That's where my eye was trained and where my heart has always been.

But Sable Island showed me something about my own perspective that I hadn't fully seen before.

When I looked at the photography that already existed of the island — and there is a lot of it — I noticed that much of it leaned into the harsher side of wild life. Survival. Struggle. The rawness of an unforgiving landscape. Beautiful work, absolutely. But it wasn't what I was drawn to capture.

What I found myself reaching for was the softer side. The gentle moments. The way a horse stood quietly in the dunes. The stillness between movements. The tenderness that exists even in a completely wild place.

I think that's what my years photographing horses and riders gave me — an eye for the emotional undercurrent of a moment rather than just the dramatic surface of it. And I didn't fully realize that until I was standing on a sandbar in the middle of the Atlantic, trying to stay out of a wild horse's way.

It's also opened a door I hadn't expected. Seeing what my eye could find in a place like Sable Island makes me curious about other wild horse populations — the mustangs of the American west, the Icelandic horses living free across volcanic landscapes. I don't know yet where that curiosity leads. But I'm paying attention to it.

The Prints

A selection of fine art prints from both Sable Island trips are available in the shop. Each one was chosen because it captured something I felt rather than just something I saw — that soft radiance of a place where the horses are simply free to be wild.

If Sable Island has been a dream of yours for as long as you can remember, I hope these images bring you a little closer to it.