05/09/2025
When looking up how to road trip the island of Newfoundland you’ll find many similar itineraries, St. John’s, Bonavista, Twilingate, Gros Morne, will show up on just about every list, reel, and blog. Cape St Mary’s, let alone the town of St Brides will seldom appear if ever.
But once you add the word “birding” all the results change! Cape St Mary’s is now one of the most recommended locations in the island.
Located at the southwestern tip of the Avalon Peninsula along the Cape Highway, St Mary’s is home to one of the largest easily accessible bird colonies in the world. “Bird rock” is less than 5 meters away from the mainland and is home to over thirty thousand gannets, the mainland target of our expedition. However nearby there’s over 100,000 birds belonging to other species.
You could be forgiven for thinking the Gannets in the photos above were gulls at first glance. But these birds are much larger and are much more closely related to Bo***es than any other bird.
These birds nest on the high cliffs of the Cape reering their young while flying off to fish and bring back food.
All these behaviours are fully visible from the mildly precarious ledge you can walk to along the mainland.
We’d originally planned to come see the gannets on the following morning having driven down from Terra Nova National Park earlier that day, but Newfoundland’s quickly changing weather put an end to that plan.
We’d just sat down for Fish and Chips at Da Birds Eye, the only restaurant in St. Brides, we finally reconnected to the internet and were met with news of a storm! (We would be corrected by the owner that this was not a storm, just some rain (40mm of rain and 80km winds but who is counting))
So our sunrise plan evolved into a very overcast sunset. The conditions pushed my camera and 200-600mm to the max and all these photos needed serious denoising! Fortunately the colony being so close to land meant that cropping was minimal and for some of these pics I even zoomed out to about 400mm because of how close the birds would fly.
The experience, and smell, were indescribable! It’s always a treat to observe wildlife that couldn’t care less about your presence!
