Discover the Best Wildlife Hotspots on Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula
It felt as if we had been swept into a David Attenborough wildlife documentary.
Thousands of birds filled the sky around us, countless more carpeted the cliffs of Gull Island and hundreds bobbed on the water feeding. We were in Witless Bay Ecological Reserve at the start of a journey to the top wildlife spots in Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula. For a photographer, it was like being a kid let loose in a candy store.
The Avalon Peninsula south of St. John’s is remarkable for having exceptional wildlife areas plus a wild coastline with some of the world’s most southerly tundra.
We were on a trip guided by local naturalist Jared Clarke, who runs Bird The Rock, offering bird and nature tours. Jared is a prime example of someone who is won over by nature. With a PhD in medicine, he was trained as a health researcher. But, as he put it, his love of nature kept leading him astray until he finally left the academic rat race and went full-time into doing what he liked best.
Puffins and More in Witless Bay
Like most visitors to Witless Bay, we were eager to find the province’s official bird, the Atlantic puffin. And find them we did, by the hundreds of thousands. The reserve protects the largest puffin colony in North America. There are more than 260,000 pairs nesting here, along with thousands of common murres, black-legged kittiwakes, razorbills and an estimated 620,000 pairs of Leach’s storm-petrels.
Public access to the four islands of the ecological reserve is restricted, so the only practical way to visit is on one of the organized boat excursions from Bay Bulls, less than an hour’s drive south of St. John’s. We took the trip with Obrien’s Whale and Bird Tours, a family-owned and operated business that has been going since 1985.
The boat cruised slowly along the cliffs of Gull Island, where we had a close-up view of the phenomenal number of seabirds spread across the rocks. In places, the murres were packed together so tightly that we could barely see the surface beneath. Kittiwakes nested in small notches on the sheer cliffs. Puffins were everywhere—wandering across the grassy slopes where they nest in burrows, on the water and filling the sky. These delightful birds are not graceful flyers, having been described as potatoes with wings. They have to flap their wings up to 400 times per minute to stay aloft.
At one point, it was a toss-up. Should we keep watching and photographing the bird extravaganza or look the other way, just offshore, where a couple of humpback whales were putting on a show? And to top it off, the scenery wasn’t so bad either, as we passed jagged coastal cliffs with sea caves and waterfalls.
Venturing Into the Barrenlands
As we headed farther south toward the tip of the peninsula, the terrain suddenly changed from forest to the Eastern Hyper-Oceanic Barrens, a rare tract of open tundra. At first glance, it seemed that we had been magically transported to the Arctic with vast expanses of mosses, lichens, alpine wildflowers, bogs and small clumps of stunted trees and shrubs called tuckamore.
The mostly treeless landscape meets the sea in dramatic style as it drops over cliffs and jumbled rocks. One set of cliffs marks Mistaken Point UNESCO World Heritage Site. It preserves some of the oldest and largest assemblages of fossils in the world, dating from 560 to 580 million years ago. We took a six-kilometre return guided hike to see a few of the fossils of these ancient boneless creatures that were preserved on the muddy sea floor when they were buried by volcanic ash.
The barrenlands have some wildlife specialties. We saw ptarmigan and plenty of northern harrier hawks that prefer open areas to hunt. It’s also home to the world’s most southerly caribou herds. Luckily, we were able to spot a couple in the distance.
Gannets Galore at Cape St. Mary’s
Nowhere do the barrenlands meet the sea in a more striking style than at Cape St. Mary’s Ecological Reserve. Not only is the scenery stunning, but it is also among the most accessible places in the world to see impressive numbers of nesting seabirds. From the end of the road at the visitor centre, it’s only a one-kilometre walk to a clifftop viewpoint where we look across to Bird Island, a massive sea stack separated from the viewing area by a small gap.
Common and thick-billed murres, kittiwakes, razorbills, black guillemots and more fill the area. But stealing the show are some 14,000 northern gannets that crowd the top of Bird Island and sprawl onto the surrounding cliffs. They seldom sit still as they fly out searching for nesting material. Pairs affectionately greet each other after one returns, and there are always squabbles between neighbours.
While the southern Avalon Peninsula covers a relatively small part of the island, it pulls more than its weight when it comes to wildlife and wild places. The best is to take a few days wandering across the region, although the most famous sites are close enough to St. John’s to do them as day trips.
If you’re after wildlife, heading out with a local expert takes things to another level. During our trip, it was much more than visiting obvious site; it was also the special hidden-away places where Jared knew to look for caribou, ptarmigan and songbirds, or an obscure hilly backroad for an eye-level view of an osprey nest.
Disclaimer: The authors were hosted by Destination St. John’s.
