Big Fish and "The Birds" "The Birds"

We left St John's and headed 45 minutes south to Beauline East. Our camp spot was on the edge of a cliff overlooking the bay. This was very handy as we could set up our lawn chairs and watch the whales feeding.

South end of a North bound Whale

Just hanging out

Unfortunately we never did see a whale "Breach". We probably saw 25-30 different whales. Humpback and Minke were the most common. There was a bumper crop of food for the whales so it will be interesting to see if the population increases over the next couple years. From Beauline we traveled on the Irish loop to St Brides. Now then this was a long run as there were no campsites between these two points and the roads were as bad as we have been on. 13 km south of St Brides is the Cape St Mary Ecological Reserve. The write up we saw said we would get a "close encounter "with the birds. Well they were not lying. You walk about 1 km from the information centre to a point where there are about 100,000 birds nesting. Yup 100,000!!

  

June's glad the wind is behind her blowing the smell away.

Gannets 2 of the 70,000

Keeping the romance alive 

Lunch Time

The Gannets were the prime species of birds but there were others.

Murres protecting their young.

The Murres looked like a cousin to the Penguin with a noticeable difference, they could fly. There were thousands of them all with their backs to the water as they shielded their young from predators 

Razor bills

We never saw any Razor Bill chicks. The razor Bill is very similar to the Murres but they have a noticeably different bill and a white stripe on the tips of their wings.

Gulls with chicks at different stages

There were at least three species of "Gulls" all nesting in the same area. The continuous noise of the birds communicating and the smell of the waste was very noticeable. We stayed here for about 3 hours and Kelly took about 400 pictures and in all that time Kelly got about a dime size splat of bird dropping on him. Not bad for 100,000 birds.

The next day we traveled to Argentia for the 16 hour ferry ride back to North Sydney Nova Scotia. We were on a waiting list and managed to get a room with 4 bunk beds as the ferry left at 5 pm and arrived at 9:30 am. The Ferry is part cruise ship part ferry and part freighter. An interesting juggling act. The food was good and the room c/w shower was clean. Whiskers the cat was not so happy but within 4 hours of driving down the highway again she forgave June. It is just over 900 km from the Port Aux Basque ferry terminal to St John's and we put just over 5,000 km on. We saw quite a bit of the Island but not enough as we hope to go back again in two years.

Take care to you all and thank-you again for reading this