The other highlight of our stay at Cabot Shores (actually, on the day we left) was a boat trip to see Bird Island, just outside of Big Bras d’Or, where puffins, kittiwakes, and razorbills nest, and where gulls, cormorants, eagles, and seals can also be seen.

Alas, I don’t have the equipment to show you pictures of the puffins we saw, but we did see them! It was a bit late in the year, so the razorbills and kittiwakes were already gone, but there were a few puffins and many seals, cormorants, eagles, gulls, and Ruddy Turnstones to keep my binoculars busy. I did manage to get a shot of some of the basking seals.

And pictures of the island, so you can get an idea of the rock faces into which the puffins dig their nests. They dig tunnels several feet into the cliffs, where they lay their eggs and raise their young.

Puffin chicks get a rude introduction to adulthood: after being fed by their parents until they are too fat to exit the narrow opening of their nest, the young are left behind as the parents return to the open ocean. (Puffins are pelagic, meaning they only return to land to breed.) They literally starve until they can leave the nest, upon which they are entirely on their own to learn to fly, hunt fish, and make their way out to the ocean, where they will spend a few years before returning to the very island on which they were born. I will never use ‘bird-brain’ as a pejorative again.