On Quebec’s Bonaventure Island, the ghosts of human habitation from years past and the birds that breed there now in extraordinary numbers tell the same story: of lives lived hard in a place of fairy-tale beauty.
You see this from the tender ages on the family gravestones of islanders who scratched out a living from the late 1700s to when Bonaventure went entirely to the birds a half century ago.
Worldwide, it remains difficult or impossible to tie any one massive die-off of seabirds or breeding calamity solely to global warming, for nature has its own jarring rhythms of abundance and deprivation. The Bonaventure gannets display a “clumsy and funny little side on land which has nothing to do with what it is when it is at sea," said David Pelletier, a leading Quebec researcher of the birds.Using air currents off the water, they fly effortlessly high over the sea and dive nearly straight down in their hunt for fish, piercing the surface at 100 kilometers an hour like so many white missiles. Their black-tipped wings, which span 2 meters , are tightly tucked behind them.
The gannets, unlike many other seabirds, seem utterly indifferent to humans. They gaze right through you with their porcelain blue eyes. Quebec's on-the-ground experts on the colony, Canadian government biologists, and seabird scientists globally say there is little to no question that global warming is reshaping the lives of the northern gannets. Warmer sea temperatures drive their prey to cooler depths, distant waters or both.
Researchers have been able to draw a strong correlation between the supply of mackerel in the gulf and the number of chicks produced. In 2012, when there were almost no mackerel, only 4% of the nests produced a chick, Guillemette said, a record low attributed to unusually warm waters that year. In March, just as the spring fishing season was opening, Canada shut commercial fishing for Atlantic mackerel and spring herring in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence, saying stocks had entered a “critical zone." Earlier efforts to restore stocks failed, in part because warmer waters had depleted the microscopic crustaceans that are the main food for the fish.
“And if the baby goes out of the nest, the parents won’t recognize him because ... they recognize the nest, not the individual. Each time they see each other it’s like they meet for the first time." If they survive that, the journey south will teach them their grace and power on the wing and into the deep.From the town of Perce, the mainland cliffs with the red-roofed houses, the commanding Perce Rock and Bonaventure Island make for an iconic panorama, and a mystical one for the people of the Gaspe Peninsula and travelers from around the world.
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