Newfoundland & Nova Scotia Jul 01—11, 2009
Posted by Kim Eckert
Kim Eckert
Kim Eckert, with over 40 years of birding experience throughout the U.S. and Canada, has now been guiding birders or teaching bird identification classes for more than 25 o...Related Trips
Considering that the leading highlights of this tour didn't really involve gannets, kittiwakes, murres, or puffins, it must have been something special! Oh yes, they were all still there: the thousands of Northern Gannets at point-blank range spilling over from their original rock to the adjacent slopes at Cape St. Mary's, equally overwhelming numbers of Black-legged Kittiwakes and Common Murres crowded on nesting cliffs both at the Cape and on Witless Bay's Gull Island, and all those unique Atlantic Puffins swarming—by the thousands, of course—around our Witless Bay tour boat.
As impressive and spectacular as all that was, it's what you come to expect in Newfoundland, and, by definition, the news means something out of the ordinary. And, indeed, our four perfectly clear and fog-free days on the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland were something unusual, considering how often the fog can get in the way. The weather there this time was even uncharacteristically better than Nova Scotia's, where, yes, there was some fog, overcast, and occasional drizzle, but none of it really obscured our ability to see what we were looking for.
So, of course, there were some Nova Scotia news headlines, and again this year the highly sought Bicknell's Thrush provided the best news, as one repeatedly posed for photos in the Highlands of Cape Breton Island. (You know it had to be cooperative if I was even able to snap some pictures!) This bird was in exactly the same site as two years ago, as VENT's record of finding this shy bird remains perfect along one of my favorite remote roads.
Other Nova Scotia highlights included two vocal Barred Owls flying back and forth at midday along another favorite back road. This same road again produced a good selection of warblers as well, and for the second year in a row we managed 20 warbler species. All but one of these were in Nova Scotia, although I admit the Palm was mostly leader-only, and the male Bay-breasted standing in the Bicknell's Thrush's road was a brief view by only a few. But there were especially memorable views of Blackburnians, Mournings, Canadas, and others, and I was intrigued by the Northern Parula singing a near-perfect Black-throated Blue song.
Admittedly, a change in the schedule of the ferry which takes us from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland temporarily slowed our tour's momentum. Normally, this cruise in full daylight offers plenty of time to look for fulmars, shearwaters, and storm-petrels, but this year half of it was at night. So, there was time to find only a few briefly-seen storm-petrels, and the lone Northern Fulmar was a leader-only bird. However, there were excellent looks at all three of the shearwater species we saw, especially the uncommon Manx, and our fulmar-less passage was forgotten as a fulmar posed nicely a few days later on the ledges of Gull Island in Witless Bay.
Newfoundland provided two other memorable headlines. One of these was the male Willow Ptarmigan along Cape St. Mary's path to the gannet rock. This hard-to-find bird is occasionally seen along the entrance road to the Cape, but even the Cape's longtime manager had never seen one anywhere between the visitor's center and the gannets! The other special news were the two Black-headed Gulls which nicely posed for us along the waterfront in the town of Witless Bay: this highly-sought gull had only been seen once in the past six tours, in 2005.
Finally, though this tour obviously focuses primarily on birds, there were some mammals making headlines as well. On land, the moose and woodland caribou we spotted were pretty special, but they paled in comparison with the marine mammals. In Nova Scotia, the pilot whales were especially visible and closer to shore than usual (as gannets dove in their midst), while the humpback whales put on a spectacular show—repeatedly breaching, lob-tailing, and spy-hopping by our Witless Bay tour boat on our last day in Newfoundland.