Bonavista, Newfoundland–part 1

I backtracked some to go back to the Bonavista Peninsula.  Last time I stayed in Port Rexton at Lockston Path Provincial Park.  This time I stayed at Paradise Farms RV Park in Bonavista.  It is just 15 minutes or so from the Puffins and maybe 20 – 25 minutes to Cape Bonavista (the whales).

I was here July 26 – 29 and I had a fantastic time, probably the highlight of my trip in Newfoundland!  I took more than 700 pictures in these 4 days and have had a really hard time selecting the pictures for the blog.  I am going to post 2 or 3  blogs with some text and then another 2 or 3 blogs with just pictures. 

On my first day, I headed over to Elliston to see what the puffins were doing.  It was my best puffin day!  Another photographer described it best -  “Puffin Overload”.  When I was here before I thought I was lucky to see  a few puffins fly over and land in the viewing area.  This day, there was 1 – 25 puffins almost the entire time I was there (several hours).  Of course there were also 100’s of puffins on the islands just 30 – 40 feet from where we were standing 

This lady sat for a while and eventually the puffins came to the area where she sat.

One even checking out her socks!  It was so much fun watching the puffins collect materials for their nest.  Sometimes they would pull and pull to try to get something up.  Occasionally they would lose their grip and fall down.Everyone watching would laugh and at times it almost appeared that the puffins enjoyed it.  They would look at us and do it again.

After spending a couple of hours here, I wanted to leave but just couldn’t because there were so many puffins still around.

Below I sat on a rock and watched for a while.  You can just see my my feet at the bottom of the picture, with a few puffins about 5 – 8 feet from me!

I visited this area every day during my stay in Bonavista.  One day the puffins were not near as active, but we had some other visitors. Humpback Whales!! Very close to the cliffs that we were standing on.

On the next picture a puffin photobombed my whale picture --

When there were not many puffins flying over to check us out, I took some pictures of the area.

The island in the background is the second “puffin island”.  The island that is on the left side of the picture is the closest “puffin island”. You can see the puffins on that island.   It is maybe 30 – 40 feet from the viewing area. 

There were several Black Guillemots hanging around.  The one above has some type of fish or shrimp that he caught.  I watched him hold it for a while, then he hid it and joined the others.