Newfoundland & Nova Scotia Jul 06—16, 2005
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
The success of a spring tour to a place like High Island or Point Pelee, where finding migrants is the whole point of the trip, certainly depends on the weather: you have to count on the right conditions to bring in or put down the birds. But during the breeding season, a day’s weather forecast matters a whole lot less. Sure, there are unpleasant days, but the birds are still there, and there’s always tomorrow to find them. However, there’s one summer tour I lead each year when one single meteorological consideration has much to say about our success. Nova Scotia and Newfoundland are wonderful places to go birding, but they would be even better if there weren’t all that fog to worry about.
Just getting there in the first place can be a challenge. None of us had any difficulties landing in Halifax, but for a couple of days after our arrival date most flights were being canceled due to fog. The rest of our birding time in Nova Scotia was mostly fog-free, but after that it was on to the ferry dock for our passage to Newfoundland. This crossing holds the potential for some of the best pelagic birding anywhere—and with virtually no need to worry about seasickness aboard this large and stable car ferry.
A few Wilson’s and lots of Leach’s storm-petrels are there every summer, Greater Shearwaters are common along with lesser numbers of Sooty and Manx shearwaters, and several Northern Fulmars are to be expected. Jaegers, usually Pomarines, are seen on most crossings; even a skua (usually, alas, unidentified) crosses the bow on perhaps a third of them, and a few Red Phalaropes are starting to migrate in July. Very nice additions to any tour’s bird list, as long as—you guessed it—the fog doesn’t get in the way. But this year it did much of the time, like it does on at least half of these trips, and there was rain as well. Still, both storm-petrels, all three shearwaters, and the fulmar were seen when the visibility improved, although there was only one unsatisfactory Manx sighting, and a fly-by phalarope was leader-only.
But there is little time to complain about fog (or to savor a fog-free crossing) when the next day is our visit to Cape St. Mary’s Seabird Sanctuary. The view here is terrific, with humpback whales and distant shearwaters cruising the ocean for food, and the cliffs lined with literally tens of thousands of gannets, kittiwakes, and murres. Naturally, this is a place shrouded in fog most of the time; indeed, in July 2004 the Cape recorded no fewer than 28 fog-filled days! So it was little wonder this year when we pulled into the parking lot with the visitor’s center nowhere in sight, even though it was only some 50 yards away. This time, for a change, luck was with us, and it cleared up nicely as we stood by the gannet rock, enough so that we were able to see the Thick-billed Murres among the Commons—something we are unable to do some years.
Meteorological luck failed us, though, the next time we needed it a couple of days later. During our day-long drive to view seabirds, ptarmigan, whales, caribou, and scenery at the headlands south of St. John?s, it was mostly either raining or foggy. A flat tire even added injury to insult. But we still saw our first humpbacks, caribou were standing by the road, hundreds of shearwaters and scoters rafted close to shore, and the diving gannets were spectacular. Naturally, there was some fog the following day on our boat trip to Witless Bay Seabird Sanctuary, but there wasn’t enough to spoil our very close views of puffins (standing less than 10 yards from the boat!), Razorbills, a family of humpbacks, and Green Island’s wall-to-wall population of 100,000 murres.
Not all of this tour’s highlights, of course, were fog-related. We saw Spruce Grouse twice: a dust-bathing and ?anting? female, plus a family of young attended by both parents. Common Eiders chased off a Great Blue Heron that had landed too close to their ducklings. A Winter Wren sang from the top of a 50-foot spruce; such a seemingly odd perch is actually appropriate for this species (and other low-to-the-ground skulkers, like Ovenbird and Mourning Warbler) when singing on territory. One of the prettiest overlooks in all of Cape Breton Highlands hosted the highly sought and secretive Bicknell’s Thrush; it was hard to know whether to look at the bird or the view. Less scenic but just as interesting was a rooftop in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where a surprising adult Iceland Gull and Lesser Black-backed Gulls chose to summer far from their normal breeding grounds.
A family of Ruffed Grouse, Great Cormorants atop a sea stack, Black-headed Gulls patrolling tidal mudflats, Arctic Terns nesting next to Commons, no fewer than 19 warbler species (including Black-throated Blue, which we hadn’t seen in years)…the highlights go on and on; even the thickest fog banks cannot obscure our memory of them.