Witless Bay Ecological Reserve

I didn’t come to Witless Bay expecting to be overwhelmed. I had seen humpbacks before, in Alaska, from a proper whale-watching vessel with a marine biologist narrating from the upper deck. That was fine. This was different. The boat was small — maybe fifteen passengers — and the captain cut the engine when we were barely out of the harbour and a humpback simply surfaced beside us, close enough that I could see the barnacles on its rostrum and smell the fish in its exhalation. The other passengers made a collective sound that wasn’t quite a gasp and wasn’t quite a shout.

Witless Bay is a small community on the Irish Loop road about forty-five minutes south of St. John’s, and the ecological reserve it fronts protects four offshore islands — Green, Gull, Great, and Pee Pee — that together host the largest Atlantic puffin colony in North America. The summer months bring humpback and minke whales feeding in the rich, cold water, and in years when the iceberg season extends into July, you get the particular Newfoundland image of whales surfacing between slowly revolving blue-white towers of glacial ice. These are not elements you arrange for effect. They simply share the water.

The puffins are absurd and wonderful. The boats can approach close to the islands and the birds are everywhere — launching off the cliff faces in their rapid, whirring flight, bobbing on the surface in congregations called rafts, standing on rocky ledges with their painted carnival faces tilted sideways and their orange feet vivid against the grey stone. Atlantic puffins carry sand lance and capelin in their bills in quantities that seem physically impossible — up to sixty fish at once, held crosswise by a tongue that keeps each one in place. I watched one land on a ledge with its bill so full of silver fish that it looked more like a fish delivery service than a seabird.

The town itself is exactly what you’d expect of an Irish Loop outport — a few streets of clapboard houses painted in the colours of hard candy, a wharf where the fishing boats tie up, a diner that opens at six for the people who go out early. What I remember most is the quality of the light on the water in the late afternoon, when the sun is low and the swell from the open Atlantic catches it, and the surface becomes broken silver for as far as you can see, and the whales are moving through it with a patience that makes your own schedule seem, briefly, absurd.

When to go: May through August. Puffins arrive in early May and the colony is in full swing by June. Whale activity peaks in June and July when capelin roll — a spawning event that draws huge numbers of whales close to shore to feed. Several operators run tours from Witless Bay; O’Brien’s Whale and Bird Tours is the most established. Book ahead in July.