2016/08 Newf'land trip - Cape Spear & Bay Bulls |
|||||
Wednesday August 17th
We had a sunny and calm morning as we rejoined the freeway, heading for Cape Spear. Our route took us through the suburbs of St John’s and then we climbed up and over the cape. It’s a notable spot, the easternmost point of North America. It’s also the site of a World War II gun battery. Luckily they were never used in battle as they were already fifty years old when acquired from the US and it would have been embarrassing to have the cannonball fall on the soldiers’ toes. The ancient gunbarrels are still there, as are the underground corridors and ammunition storerooms.
The main attraction though is the cape’s lighthouse, nearly 200 years old, the oldest surviving lighthouse on the island. It has been replaced by an uninteresting automated electric one, and the original has been restored to its original 1836 condition.
The lighthouse has been configured as a museum of the keepers’ lives. All of the rooms are furnished but it’s nice to see that the essentials were taken care of.
We bought a few souvenirs and moved on south. These new townhouses were in Petty Harbour, painted perhaps to match the province’s tourism image. The multi-coloured street seems to be fashionable in east coast towns, less so on the west coast where whole villages may be white.
We drive down the coast to Bay Bulls where a couple of companies run boats out to the bird colonies on the islands off Witless Bay ecological reserve. There are millions of birds there in the breeding season, puffins, murres, petrels, and kittiwakes. We were there for the puffins and maybe a whale if one showed up.
We arrived at Gatherall’s dock just as the boat was leaving so we had a mad scramble to grab coats and cameras and join the trip. We had an entertaining guide, both a good talker and a talented singer of Newfie songs.
As soon as we left the dock we were into a strong wind and the boat was pitching and tossing, hard for us to stay upright without clutching
the rail. Our first birds were a group of bald eagles roosting in the harbour’s trees. Our guide said they would fly out to the islands each day at breakfast time to pick up an Egg McPuffin.
The boat took us out to Gull Island and then Green Island. Puffins nest in caves and burrows, mainly in the green and earthy bits of the 
islands. Murres (with the black heads) just lay an egg on a rocky shelf; this doesn’t require much space so murres live beak to beak.
The picture of the cliff was taken off Green Island. Every dot in that picture is a murre and there are tens of thousands there.
 |
Bay Bulls (7.48) |
 |
|---|
If you see Roast Turr on the menu here, you’re getting one of these, an acquired taste we’re told. The sky was full of birds going out to fish and birds coming back loaded, the murres with fish in their stomachs and puffins with fish dangling from their beaks. These are little birds and they fly very fast. I needed both hands to pan my long lens fast enough, so I was being thrown about by the boat’s pitching. I started out on a crowded part of the top deck but soon cleared myself a space!
The murres fly out in formation, the puffins less orderly, but they all come home in a stream, puffins and murres together.
This was our view of Gull Island as we returned to Bay Bulls. Sandie said she was frozen but she’d enjoyed the trip. We hadn’t seen any whales and our guide admitted that at this time of the year they see about one a day and there are usually three or four trips, so those are the odds. We didn’t care; we’d seen our puffins.
 |
Bay Bulls' puffins |
|---|