Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
frequently sighted in coastal open water and pack ice habitats, and they whelp later than either ringed or harp
seals, in late April and early May. Hooded seals also whelp on the pack ice off the coast of Labrador and north-
east Newfoundland, but they do so in widely scattered groups, before spending their summers in Greenland
waters.
Harbor seals occur in small numbers along the southern and central Labrador coast, where they whelp in
caves or on rocky ledges or beaches at the mouths of rivers. Gray seals also occur, though rarely, on the coast,
often on outer islands, having wandered far from their breeding grounds in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Many of
the gray seals found in Labrador waters are immature animals.
Seabirds on the Move
The Labrador coast is a gathering place not only for marine mammals but for seabirds as well. There are more
than a thousand breeding colonies along its largely unsettled length, the largest being the Gannet Islands,
which, oddly enough, are named for a ship wrecked there, not the bird, since no gannets nest this far north. It
is, however, an important breeding colony for alcids: 17,000 pairs of common murres, 5,000 of razorbills, and
3,700 of puffins. They feed between the islands and the mainland during breeding season, from April to
August.
Labrador waters are also a meeting place for seabirds on the move. Common murre chicks, each accompan-
ied by a parent from the great colony at Funk Island, swim to Labrador from late July onward and are joined
there by parents and chicks from the smaller Labrador colonies. At the same time, large flocks of thick-billed
murres from the huge colonies in Hudson Strait are moving southward to the central Labrador coast, where
they will stay until the sea ice forms in January.
The scale of this coming together of the murre clans is truly spectacular. The 7 million adult thick-bills and
1 million commons, together with another million chicks, represent a significant proportion of the breeding
murre population of the Canadian Arctic, Atlantic Canada, and west Greenland. Mixed in with the murres are
razorbills—roughly 70 percent of the New World population of this rarest of all the auk breeds on the Gannet
Islands. Finally, dovekies, the smallest of the alcids, move into Labrador waters in October from their large
breeding colonies in west Greenland and stay until April or May.
The outer edge of the Labrador Current, where temperature boundaries—fronts between the cold current
and the slightly warmer Labrador Sea— tend to concentrate plankton, is also an important feeding area for red
and red-necked phalaropes. These small marine shorebirds form dense flocks as they pass through Labrador
waters on their way to and from their breeding grounds in the Arctic along the entire length of this temperature
boundary, from Hudson Strait to the Strait of Belle Isle. Waterfowl also congregate in significant numbers
along the Labrador coast, including all three species of scoters: black, surf, and white-winged. Surf and white-
winged scoters tend to concentrate in sheltered bays, whereas black scoters often form dense flocks—like thick
lines inked on the horizon—farther out to sea. Some fourteen thousand pairs of common eiders also breed
along the Labrador coast, and they are joined by Baffin Island eiders during their southward migration.
Finally, in a crescendo to this avian movement, Canada geese and other waterfowl that breed in freshwater
habitat in the interior of Labrador—black ducks, common goldeneye, and red-breasted and common mer-
gansers— migrate to the coast to feed at the end of the breeding season.
In his classic topic, Birds of America, John James Audubon gives us a dramatic bird's-eye view of the Lab-
rador coast from the perspective of the great black-backed gull, which he painted there: “High in the keen air,
far above the ragged crags of the desolate shores of Labrador proudly sails the tyrant Gull . . . On widely ex-
tended pinions, he moves in large circles, eyeing the objects below . . . onward he sweeps over rocky bay, vis-
its the little islands, and shoots off toward the mossy heaths . . . Far off among the rolling billows, he spies the
carcass of some monster of the deep, and, on steady wing, glides off toward it. Alighting on the huge whale, he
throws his head upward, opens his bill, and, louder and fiercer than ever, sends his cries through the air.”
