Good morning!
Good morning, friends!
We woke up here in Percé
and our hotel is right on the water so we had a beautiful view of Percé Rock.
Right now, we’re walking along the wharf
because we’re about to get on a boat.
We are heading to Bonaventure Island, which sits in the Gulf of the St. Lawrence.
So we’re going to head from where we are now, which is just on the coast of the Gaspé Peninsula
into the water towards the island.
Hello, thank you.
On the boat.
And our trusty boat is called…
The Félix-Leclerc.
Yes!
Just seems… -Rolls off the tongue.
We just circled around Percé Rock.
There are penguins and cormorants,
seals,
and something I was definitely not expecting to see are whales.
I think he said minke whales.
And there were two of them at least just bobbing up and down out of the water.
Amazing!
Extra special treat I was not expecting today.
We’re making our way around the island.
We just saw some seals.
Some in the water but mainly they’re up on the rocks sea bathing.
And there are thousands and thousands and thousands of birds.
They’re flying in the air.
They’re also sitting on the cliffs
and it really feels like we've just entered a different world.
Their world.
Alright we’ve touched down here on Bonaventure Island.
It was an absolutely amazing boat ride.
And this is actually a national park.
Yeah there are colonies of seabirds here.
They make up 200,000 birds from 11 different species
making this the largest migratory bird sanctuary in North America.
So there’s a lot to see.
So we’re going to take this one starting up going through here,
ending up at the birds,
and then we’re going to come back this way — see more birds —
and then all the way back through.
We found the trail.
And we were just saying how we came over obviously with a boatload of other people
and yet somehow they’ve all disappeared.
Maybe we just got a slow start.
But it’s really nice because it feels like in a way we have the island all to ourselves.
I guess we’re on a boat with a bunch of expert hikers.
Slow and steady.
First rest stop here.
Decided it was snack time.
I’m popping some almonds.
Almonds and some apple sauce.
There is a lunch place here on the island but you can also bring your own packed lunch.
So that’s what we’re doing.
It’s more fun.
Picnic anywhere.
Or picnic everywhere.
Almonds are the best snack.
Fact.
Do you smell that fresh air?
It does smell really nice actually. -Yeah.
Like forest fresh air.
There’s absolutely no pollution here so because there’s such good air quality,
there's a lot of lichen that’s growing.
And lichen, if you ever see lichen, it means the air is good.
So make sure you breathe in that air.
Oh…we like lichen.
We like lichen.
There are four different trails that you can do around the island
for a total of I think about 15 kilometres worth of trails.
The whole island is just over 4 kilometres squared.
And we are taking one that comes right kind of through the middle called The Colonies
that’s going to lead us to where all the Northern Gannets are.
And we just peaked the water ahead of us so I think we are getting close.
Wow!
Okay we found the bird colony.
You could hear them before you could see them.
Oh my god!
There’s so many birds here!
It’s incredible.
These must be those same cliffs that we just passed in the boat.
It’s just a sea of white.
So many of them, eh?
I can’t believe how close you can get here!
This is what we have come here to see.
This is the famous colony of Northern Gannets.
It’s the most accessible in the whole world.
This colony makes up over 114,000 of them.
That’s how many are here right now.
They come here to nest and to breed.
They’re one of the biggest seabirds.
Their wingspan is about 6 feet.
And there are a lot of different bird species here on the island.
You can recognize the Northern Gannets because they have white and black with kind of a yellow head.
They’re a noisy bunch as you can tell and it’s so much fun to just watch them.
Some of them keep flying in with what looks like seaweed,
some of them are picking grass and eating it,
and there’s some fighting going on…some squabbles,
and just seeing them en masse and the sheer number is absolutely spectacular.
This colony here is the third largest in the world.
The first and second largest are actually in Scotland.
And what’s interesting about these birds and how they mate
is that they do pair off but they don’t stay together the whole year round.
They just come back together to mate every year.
They’re more loyal to their territory than they are to each other.
And if you’re wondering like I was how they find each other to mate,
they just basically say, “I’ll meet you at the nest next year” and that’s what happens.
They each know to go to their nest — their territory that they are loyal to —
and they’ll meet the partner there and that’s how they find each other every single year.
Both of the partners male and female will use different materials like seaweed and feathers and grass —
you’ll see them picking grass — to build the nest.
And they make sort of a circular mound with a dip in the middle
held together with their own excrement — very resourceful — easy to find —
and then they both incubate the egg
and it's unfortunate but a lot of the chicks that hatch, they don’t survive.
Only about 40% of the eggs that hatch will survive.
Northern Gannets can start reproducing at age 5 and they can live until up to about 20.
And the Gannets are super territorial birds so even between the pairs, they are territorial.
So when one mate arrives at the nest, the male attacks the female by nipping at her neck.
And then the female, being more peaceful, presents her neck and actually lets the male partner bite it.
Another behaviour that you can see between the mates is called fencing.
That’s where both partners face each other
and they open their wings wide and kind of knock their bills together
and this greeting ritual at the nest serves to kind of calm down the male’s aggressiveness
and strengthens the pair’s bond.
Another way that the mates will dissipate the male’s aggressiveness and bond
is that each partner will caress the other’s neck and head with the tip of its bill.
That’s called billing.
One of the things you’ll see a lot here in the colony is called sky pointing
and that’s when a Gannet wants to take off.
It kind of stretches its neck and its bill towards the sky, lifting its feet one at a time,
and in doing this, it’s actually filling its pectoral air sacks
to lessen the effect of the impact when it dives into the water.
And all the while it’s doing this, it is calling raucously
to let its partner know that it wants to leave the nest.
So a lot of these calls that we’re hearing is part of that behaviour.
Northern Gannets are extremely territorial
and one of the ways that a bird will warn another bird that this is their territory
is moving its head from side to side while it’s calling with it’s wings sort of half-spread.
And then it ducks its head down beneath one of its wings several times in a row
and the birds do this a lot when they’re trying to communicate with each other.
You’ll also see this aggressive streak in a behaviour called jabbing
where these adversaries will kind of stretch their necks out, opening their beaks and threatening one another
and they might even grab each other’s beaks.
That’s warning them to keep away.
Sometimes the aggressive behaviour actually does become violent
and the birds can fight for more than an hour
and it makes them really exhausted and occasionally they even get hurt.
When the Gannets aren’t being aggressive, one of their calmer behaviours that you’ll see is just resting.
And they kind of hide their head beneath their wings
and they also sleep this way at night so if we were here at night,
it would be a lot quieter than it is now during the day.
This year unfortunately, the colony is having a problem with the avian flu
that has entered the colony and so you will see some dead birds around.
This place is unbelievable.
The last time we were this close to birds I think was in the Galapagos
but it's pretty cool to know that this exists in Canada.
And really I feel like David Attenborough today.
I wish we had a lot longer to spend here.
I don’t want to leave.
We’ve spent hours just watching these birds.
It’s just amazing.
But unfortunately, the last boat is going to leave without us if we don’t leave right now.
So we have to head out but this has just been unbelievable, like I will never forget this.
Me either.
I promise we’re trying to leave.
I promise we’re trying not to miss the last boat but look at this.
There’s thousands of them.
Over 100,000 of them!
And they’re all flying above us on this part of the trail like…
Good news is we’ve arrived back at the wharf with time to get the last boat
but we spent every last possible moment with the Northern Gannets colony.
Secretly I was kind of hoping we’d miss the boat so we could sleep with them but…
It does beg the question, what happens if you miss the boat?
Not really sure…it’s kind of too far to swim so…
But we’re not going to find that out tonight. -No.
Because I can see the boat coming so we’re good.
This has just been an incredible day.
Absolutely exceeded my expectations.
Highly, highly recommend coming here and spending an entire day.
I will just never forget it.
It was incredible.
So I hope that you guys have enjoyed it as well.
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Bye!