Puffins!...Indeed

Left: (R-L) Ryan, Keith, and I in front of a ginormous iceberg that we saw on our cruise out to Witless Bay.
Right: Puffins! on the island of the Witless Bay Ecological Reserve (courtesy of Keith)

After our fun-filled weekend exploring the Irish Loop, we all decided to go see the Puffins at Witless Bay. Basically, the puffins (as an endangered species...i think) have one of their main rookeries on the East Coast on this island in the Witless Bay, at Bay Bulls. Due to this important fact, the whole small island is protected and almost no one (save tops 3 people at any time) are allowed on the island.

So, we all headed down in the pickup to Witless Bay. By we, I mean Keith, Ryan, me, and Maria from North Dakota, a will-be grad student at MUN in Heritage Studies (she really likes museums!). We decided to affectionately call her, "Dakota" in homage to her home state. Thank god they didn't call me Michigan or Louisiana. Anyway, we got overpriced tickets to go out on one of the sightseeing tours. Again, this was another one of the occasions where we HOPED to see whales, but in fact, I NEVER saw a whale for my entire 7 weeks in NL. Anyway, we saw a huge iceberg (see above), which I still think of as one of the more awesome things I've seen first-hand in my life (rank that up with the Rio Grande...). Then, we saw the tons and tons of puffins. Now the picture above doesn't really do justice, because these puffins are really beautiful, beautiful birds. They suck at flying and basically have to flap their wings constantly just to stay in the air, and when they walk on the rocks, they move like penguins, nudging each other out of the way. The coolest thing about them, though, is that they're AMAZING fishers. These birds apparently dive down as much as 50 meters for fish and can stay under! Another point of amazement was that their beaks, the colored things, are only colored during mating season (warmer months) and then they lose them and gain a grey beak instead.

Anyway, the whole experience out on the water was great, despite the price for the tickets, and the not seeing any whales part.