THE AVALON PENINSULA, PART 2

EASTERN CANADA JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY

THE AVALON PENINSULA  (Part 2)

JUNE 9-14, 2011

Cape St. Mary's Ecological Reserve

Gale at Cape St. Mary's

Courting Gannets

The following day was devoted to a 200 mile round trip to Cape St. Mary’s Ecological Preserve (800-563-6353 for more info), on the southwest tip of the Avalon Peninsula.  World-renowned as the only place to see a huge Northern Gannett colony from land, the drawback is that it is usually shrouded in fog so thick that you might as well be inside a cotton ball.  If you go, try and pick a day with winds from the north or northwest, which will blow the fog out to sea.  Otherwise, it’s quite chancy.  We were lucky, beyond belief.  The wind pushed the fog away, the afternoon sun miraculously appeared and the gannet colony was lit up like the bright lights of Broadway.  Above the huge rock on which most of the colony of 11,000 nests, a constant cloud of gannets circled, like the white flakes in a snow globe that has just been shaken.  Except these flakes never stopped.  A very easy one mile cliff top trail from the new Visitor Center leads to the colony, providing views of the colony from all sides, including the huge number of nesting common murres and black-legged kittiwakes that fill every fault line in the cliffs like rows of pearls.  As you walk through the moorish grassland, listen for the tinkling song of horned larks and the buzzy trills of savannah sparrows, which you may see singing from lichen crusted rocks.  Bald eagles perch nearby, in hopes of an easy meal, while common ravens ominously circle, looking for an egg or chick to steal.  Gale even saw one shove a kittiwake (“tickleace” in local parlance) off its nest, grab the egg and make off with it.  That’s what a food chain is all about.

Bald Eagle at Cape St. Mary's

Gannet Nest Restaurant offering

The trail terminates at a comfortable perch not 50 feet from the main gannet nesting area.  The squawking can be loud, as the birds wheel and dive, sometimes ten feet away, and from nests that are within inches of each other.  They may complain about their nearby neighbors, but their courtship displays are sensational.  Intertwining their toasted marshmallow colored heads, they slap their blue and black-lined beaks together after one delivers a bit of seaweed for the shallow nest.  The pair bonds for life and one egg is laid per year.  Strictly fish eaters, gannets are built like pointy torpedoes.  As they fish from great heights, they plunge-dive into the ocean, folding their wings at the last moment to enter the water like an arrow.  When hundreds of birds do this at once, it’s an unforgettable aerial display.

There’s not much to accommodate tourists near Cape St. Mary’s, but right near the entrance road is the Gannet’s Nest Restaurant (www.gannetsnest.com), where you can not only enjoy super fresh cod and tasty seafood chowder, but also moose stew, moose soup(!) and purchase jars of moose and rabbit meat.  The cod was great, but you do have to try moose meat.  It’s very light tasting, low in fat and you can tell your friends you ate Bullwinkle.

Snowy Owl at Salmonier nature Park

If you have time on the way to or from Cape St. Mary’s, and you enjoy zoos, make a stop at the Salmonier Nature Park (www.env.gov.nl.ca/env/snp), a very unique facility that displays several local animals.  The park is free and features a 1.5 mile boardwalk through the boreal forest.  Every two hundred yards or so is an enclosure, most of them very spacious, that holds creatures such as snowy owl, moose, Canadian lynx, Newfoundland marten, peregrine falcon, beaver, bald eagle, caribou, arctic and red foxes.  

Our final day on Avalon Peninsula brought us to the towns of Cupids, Bay Roberts and Harbour Grace near Trinity Bay.  Cupids is the birthplace of the English in Canada, having been founded in 1610 by Captain John Guy, who was the brother of Sir Walter Raleigh.  Their is an excellent interpretive center detailing the area’s history.  To understand the development of Newfoundland, you have to appreciate that almost every town in the province was originally built on a protected inlet from the sea, where fishermen could row their fragile hand-made dories and set their hand-made nets in the sea, to haul in a catch of cod to dry on racks, salt in barrels and sell to foreign markets.  It was a hard and dangerous life and to make the fishing easier, the towns were built near the mouth of the inlet, close to the ocean.  There were few roads and virtually all commerce was done by sea.  In the 1950s, roads and services started to arrive at these “outports”, as they were known, including outboard motors, bigger boats and factory made equipment.  The townspeople gradually migrated back toward the end of the bay, where it was more protected from the violent storms that frequented these coasts, especially in winter, which is most of the time here.  At the present, the old towns have all but been completely abandoned and modern villages have replaced them.  In 1992, when the fishing moratorium was imposed due to the collapse of the fishery on the Grand Banks, the old way of life ended in all but the most isolated outports.  70,000 people whose lives were dependent on the fishing industry left Newfoundland permanently.  

Which brings us back to Cupids.  The entire town was originally built on a jut of land called Burnt Head, but now no one lives there.  Just meadows and swales where houses and lanes and small subsistence gardens used to be.  And the sea.  Endlessly frothing and foaming and crashing amongst the ragged rocks, it’s hard to imagine what life must have been like to go out to sea in a small open boat every day for survival.  At present, the end of the road is the beginning of a scenic trail that circles Burnt Head and takes about an hour to walk, including stopping to see fox sparrows and yellow warblers.  Don’t miss it.  And while your there, stay and dine at the reasonably priced Cupids Haven B&B (www.cupidshaven.ca), in a beautifully converted Anglican Church that was built to serve the town that is no longer there.  Try the partridgeberry pudding, a local delight.

Sam and Gale on Bay Roberts

Mussels and Newfie Beer

Bay Roberts is similar, but much larger than Cupids, and the tourism office went all out for us.  The town manager, Pat Doyle, took us out in his sturdy fishing boat for a spin around the bay, followed by a mussel and snow crab “boil” on a stony beach where the old town used to be.  Both were cooked in fresh, cold sea water, scooped right out of the incredibly clear water at our feet.  I ate the mussels like they were popcorn, then stuffed myself on the fresh crab.  As soon as the crab is cooked, they “shock” it in ice cold sea water and slit the legs open.  The meat pops out so easily it was like having a lobster.  There is much United States history in Bay Roberts, where a special cable building was built for WW I & II to oversee communications between the US and its European allies during the wars, enabling Roosevelt and Churchill converse from this base.  

Snow Crabs

Rose Manor Inn

We stayed in the next bay over, Harbor Grace, at the delightful Rose Manor Inn (www.therosemanor.com), a B&B built in 1878 and painstakingly and lovingly restored by its current owners.  With only four elegantly decorated rooms, it is perfectly quaint and charming.  Our room was the Peter Easton, named after the most powerful pirate in the western hemisphere in 1610 and based his operations in Newfoundland.  Next door was the Amelia Earhart room, who departed North America from Harbour Grace on her ill-fated flight around the globe.

Our flight around the Avalon Peninsula had come to a conclusion, as must this chapter of our story.

To be continued...

Questions?  Write sam.fried@live.com