June 20 (Day 43) to June 23 (Day 46): St .John’s, Newfoundland and Puffins, Puffins, and more Puffins along The Irish Loop Road.

The view from our RV park

The view from our 'living room'

We only did about 50 miles with the intent to stay in another Provincial Park, but when we arrived the place was full due to very nice weekend weather and the end of a long winter that brought the locals out into the woods.  Michele noticed an innocuous sign earlier that said “full service RV Park” so we back tracked off the main highway to find the Celtic Rendezvous with room for us.  Room did not describe the site where we perched on the top of a cliff overlooking several small islands just off shore and very reachable with binoculars.  We got out our lawn chairs, sat on the point and watched thousands of Atlantic Puffins on the slopes of the islands and fishing in the water below as well as that many gulls and other shore birds.  Before long the sun was going down.  This journey has had any number of experiences where something doesn’t go as planned and through sheer happen stance something better comes along – this was it!  We stayed three nights.

Puffins at their nest holes

Bachelor puffins... on the cliffs

Next day we had reservations for the highly rated O’Brien’s Puffin and Whale boat tour out of Bay Bulls, NL with an Atlantic Ocean as flat as we’ve seen it yet and bright sunshine.  Thanks to Michele’s elbows we grabbed incredible seats at the very front of the upper deck and were we in for a treat.  The islands we toured are part of the Witless Bay Ecological Reserve with a puffin population estimated in the neighborhood of 260,000 nesting pairs!  They were everywhere along the islands hillsides where they make their nests in burrows in available soil, swimming around our boat and flying directly overhead.  Where the soil gave way to sharp cliffs there were thousands of nesting Black Backed Gulls, Herring Gulls, Ring-billed Gulls, Common Murres, Thick Billed Murres, Northern Gannets, Black-legged Kittiwakes, Razorbills, Black Guillemots, and Cormorants to name a few.  As we neared the island at one point the pungent odor of bird guano was so loud that we knew those birds had been coming to that same location for many years.  That said, they will all be gone in another month or two, back to the open ocean where they spend most of their lives. 

Common mures

Those dots are all birds!

A bit like Hitchock's "The Birds"

birds everywhere!

We topped this remarkable day off with many sightings of Minke Whales and an early Humpback that we saw several times.  The Humpbacks have not come this far north yet because their primary food source, the small Capelin that comes on shore in the millions to spawn in local streams are not here yet.  We hope to solve that when we are further south in Nova Scotia.  Right, a lot we have to do with it!  What a day.  Tomorrow we move along down the Irish Loop to Mistaken Point Ecological Reserve near Portugal Cove South to hike in and see the finest examples of fossils of the earliest life forms on earth.