Newfoundland!

 Nancy and I have finally made it to our 10th, and final Canadian Province. Now we need to work on the Territories. After an extremely stressful day of travel on Monday, June 6, we got down to business on our first day on Tuesday, June 7 with one of our first stops being the easternmost point in North America, Cape Spear.

And here we are on that fine summer day. The temperature never rose above 7 degrees celsius...we're in Canada now but even in farenheit it was COLD all day.

Our guide, Jared Clarke who operates BirdTheRock Tours, suggested we head into the woodlands for a bit to get out of the strong north wind. We succeeded quite nicely with a variety of birds and I got some nice photos of the common, but not often cooperative, Blackpoll Warbler.

After a few other birding stops, we headed to Bay Bulls to take a boat tour of Witless Bay Ecological Reserve. This sign on the mainland south of Bay Bulls is conveniently located to photograph in front of the two main islands visited, Gull Island on the left and Green Island on the right.

Once out of the bay, we turned south and headed to Gull Island, the most diverse and interesting of the two. As we approached, we could start to see what was in store with what looked like swarms of gnats around the island. Hundreds of thousands of nesting seabirds await...

The Common Murres were clearly the most abundant species with hundreds of thousands of breeding pairs.

About a half-million Atlantic Puffins breed here too at their largest colony in North America.

Smaller numbers, perhaps a few tens of thousand pairs, of Black-legged Kittiwakes also nest here.

Only a few of the dapper Razorbill were seen. Some were sitting on some nice chocolate rocks with white icing dripping down. No wait, that's NOT what that is...

The rarest of all the seabirds nesting on these islands are some of the southernmost breeding Thick-billed Murres. We only saw two of them, and they had to be picked out from the thousands of nearly identical Common Murres by their blacker coloration and the small white line on their slightly thicker bills.

After we dropped Jared off, and stopped briefly back at our motel in St. John's, we went back out before dinner to a pond that we had checked first thing this morning for a long-staying Pink-footed Goose. This would have been the only new species for our Canada list on this trip but it was hiding this morning. But not this afternoon!