Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
I well remember my first encounter with the petrels of Baccalieu. I was sitting in the lightkeeper's house on
an unusually warm summer night for Newfoundland. The window had been left open in the kitchen to allow
the air to circulate. Although I had seen the burrows in the dense stands of balsam fir, where one adult tends
the chick while the other is offshore foraging, I had not seen a single adult bird during the day. But shortly
after night had fallen, I began to hear the birds returning en masse to the island. Their cries were like the elec-
tronic babble of a synthesizer or the anonymous chatter of the rain forest. Then one of the birds accidentally
flew in through the open window and was gently captured by the lightkeeper's Golden Retriever, and the light-
keeper released it. Outside, I marveled at the huge flocks of petrels circling the lighthouse like moths to the
flame. Unless the moon is out, a petrel cannot locate its burrow—one among millions—by sight, which means
that both smell and sound probably play primary roles. Petrels find food by odor, so it is likely they also use
smell to locate the colony, then home in on their mate's call to pinpoint their nesting burrow. Once they have
located the burrow, they regurgitate the food they have plucked from the waves to sustain the single chick.
After Baccalieu, the largest Newfoundland colonies are on a quartet of islands—Gull, Green, Great, and Pee
Pee—in Witless Bay, midway along the eastern, or Irish, shore of the Avalon Peninsula. Protected as part of
the Witless Bay Ecological Reserve, the islands provide refuge for the largest concentration of breeding
seabirds in eastern North America, including three-quarters of the Atlantic puffins (260,000 pairs) and the
largest breeding concentration of black-legged kittiwakes in the northwest Atlantic, as well as the second-
largest colony of common murres and the second-largest colony of storm petrels (some 620,000 pairs) in the
world.
