The sight of 120,000 northern gannets, nesting noisily on a rocky island in Quebec's Gaspé region, is spectacular – but this year, it's a wildlife watching experience tinged with tragedy.
“It breaks my heart to probably know that this year is the best year to see the colony,” says Carole Couet of Parks Quebec, her commanding voice cracking as she describes the future facing the largest and most accessible gannetry in the world.
“We do not know what will happen when our birds go south. In the next two or three years we will see – but we know they will go in those waters.”
Couet is speaking of the Gulf of Mexico, where crude continues to spew from a leaking off-shore oil well. This is where the thousands of gannets that mate in Canada each summer will return in October to spend the winter, and no one knows for sure just what that will mean for future populations.
A young northern gannet was one of the first oily birds pulled from the slick near Louisiana, and experts fear thousands more may perish as a result of the disaster, either by consuming or being consumed by the toxic waters.
But for now, the big birds are safe and sound – soaring, squawking and procreating on this isolated island at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, just off the eastern tip of the rugged Gaspé Peninsula.
We've arrived at the l'Île-Bonaventure-et-du-Rocher-Percé National Park on one of the tour boats that ferry passengers past the red face of Percé Rock to nearby Bonaventure Island every 20 minutes each day. Wheeling above us, as we round the steep cliffs, are thousands of graceful white gannets, their black-tipped wings catching the ocean updrafts as they scan the waters for fish and sea plants, while their mates protect their nests, tucked into the rock walls and massed like a snowbank across a windswept slope.
When the boat docks, we follow Couet into one of the historic red and white buildings that dot the shoreline for quick lesson in gannet behaviour before heading down the hiking trail to the colony. It's a pleasant 45-minute walk through the forest to the blustery point, where 60,000 nesting pairs each guard a single egg beneath their rubbery webbed feet.
You can hear the cacophony before you actually see the mass of bobbing birds, and it's a stunning sight to behold.
Gannets are beautiful creatures – pristine white plumage with a blush of saffron across their heads during mating season, and startlingly icy blue eyes, framed by graphic black lines that might have been painted by a creative makeup artist.
The colony is literally behind a rope barrier where the thousands of nesting birds are nearly close enough to touch. Observers, with binoculars and cameras with telephoto lenses, watch and snap from a grassy slope or from wooden platforms perched above the neatly spaced nests.
It's like a bird's-eye view of any crowded community – thousands of couples squabbling and making up, neighbours jostling for space, commuters leaving and returning home in a steady stream. Gannets, while elegant in flight, are comically clumsy as they take off and land from the crowded slope and we watch as they somersault from the sky.
Each of the 60,000 nests here is a mere 60 centimetres away from its neighbour, so territorial disputes erupt continuously as birds fly in with their long beaks laden with seaweed and other nesting materials, or inadvertently stray across territorial lines.
These big seabirds mate for life – though they don't actually recognize their mates, Couet says. Gannets are fiercely territorial, and both male and female return to the same nest each year, a shallow mound of seaweed and feathers, where the birds take turns incubating a solitary blue-green egg.
Couples engage in a kind of bill-to-bill swordplay when they meet, and we watch them stretch their long necks skyward, crossing their pale blue bills in an elegant greeting.
