« Il s’en tuë jusques dans les jardins de Québec ». La place des animaux sauvages dans la ville (Québec et Montréal, 1663-1763)

Immersed in a new environment, the settlers, travelers, missionaries and authors of travelogues on New France frequently gave prominence to the description of fauna in their works, emphasizing its diversity and above all its abundance: Samuel de Champlain, Jacques Cartier, Gabriel Sagard, Pierre Boucher and others marvelled at the profusion of migratory birds, the incredible richness of the St. Lawrence River in terms of fishing, as well as the multitude of moose, bears, caribou, stags, foxes, wolves, beavers and deer. Their ample presence is associated with the rural, natural world, with the boreal forests that were their habitat. On the other hand, indigenous species of animals were much less assimilated with the urban setting of the historiographical landscape. The tendency of a great number of them to come closer to man, combined with the proximity of the city with a diversity of terrestrial, avian and aquatic wildlife, allows us, however, to assume they were present there. Taking as a setting Montreal and especially Quebec City—for which information is more abundant—this article looks at the interaction between urban colonial society and its environment between 1663 and 1763. It seeks to measure the extent to which wildlife—essentially the passenger pigeon—played a role in city life and its organization, giving rise to practices such as hunting in urban spaces. Research allows us to transpose an issue generally connected to the rural world to an environment with which it was not necessarily associated, making it possible to understand, through non-human agents, the way in which a society appropriates, shapes, manages and conceives its space.