The nesting mother gannet (Sula bassana) on the conglomerate ledges of the Great Bird Rock, overlooking the Gulf of St. Lawrence. This bird, often called the solan goose and taking its Latin name from its best known home on the Bass Rock near Edinburgh, is the largest and most beautiful of our salt-water fowl. The body of the adult bird is almost entirely white, the wing tips being black, the neck and head washed with buff, and the bill bluish gray rocks of the same gray and red color, all of the same geological age and formation and having the same horizontal position. Mr. P. A. Taverner, of the Geological Survey of Canada, has estimated, from a series of photographs, that the population of the gannets alone in the Bonaventure colony is between 7000 and 8000, a very much larger number than that as all the Atlantic Coast-a mass of vertical limestone tinted with red, yellow, and purple, with undulating verdurecapped summit, and it is the wavy top that is the abode of a colony composed of two species of birds, the herring gull and the crested cormorant. Ever since the days in the late years of the sixteenth century, when the fishermen from Brittany and the Bay of Biscay The coming of the A group of razor-billed auks on the ledges of the Great Bird Rock of the Magdalen Islands. This bird is the nearest relative of the extinct great auk which at one time also inhabited Great Bird Rock began their operations at this celebrated fishing port, the cries of the sea birds have been the familiar accompaniment of the life of the coast and the gulls of Percé Rock an historic part of the living scenery of the coast. No one kills a herring gull except a hungry fisherman whose palate does not yet resent the fishy flavor of the fluffy young bird stumbling about the beaches. The Percé Rock is unscalable and thus the birds have had a fair natural protection, but their greatest protection has, I think, lain in the fact that here close upon the shore they have always been kindly regarded by the people of the place as their natural neighbors and helpful scavengers for dirty beaches. gulls and their departure mean to the people the promise and the farewell of the summer. All of these territories are in the Province of Quebec and the County of Gaspé. On the seventeenth of last March a bill which had been introduced in the Quebec Parliament for the purpose of establishing these colonies as protected bird sanctuaries became a law. In many respects the law is a very extraordinary enactment, for it is frankly based upon recognition of the "rapid and alarming decrease in the number" of these birds by which there has resulted a "threatened extinction"; and because these are "almost the last resorts of certain vanishing species. . . interesting to all lovers of nature and science and valuable as scavengers," the law has been framed and passed with sentiment paramount and human economy taking a secondary place. The birds are protected to prevent them from vanishing, because they are interesting and wondrous creations of great beauty, and incidentally because they are valuable as scavengers. Perhaps in the entire history of bird legislation in the western continent no other regulative measure, so essentially based upon the higher sentiment of the community, has been enacted, and for The great gannet colony of Bonaventure Island is separated into two companies. The observer approaching the island from the north first comes upon the lesser colony; then a hiatus follows of barren rock cliff before the second and larger colony begins. It seems possible that this uninhabited interval owes its existence to a great rock fall in the remote past, which blotted out for its bird inhabitants all memory of their former nesting places Photograph by F. M. Chapman Courtesy of D. Appleton and Company Gannets, murres, and puffins on the horizontal rock ledges of the Great Bird Rock, Magdalen Islands. In view of the years of persecution to which these birds have been subjected, they are still remarkably tame this reason the law stands tremendously to the credit of the parliament and the people of Quebec. It is a stringent law; it takes under its cover all the migratory game birds and migratory insectivorous birds as well as the migratory nongame birds, in pursuance of the migratory bird law, this being an important but actually an incidental part of the legislation. To the sanctuaries thus created we have been referring: the Bird Rocks and a one-mile zone surrounding them; a strip of land on the north and east sides of Bonaventure Island, ten feet in depth along the cliffs with the face of the cliffs itself, this provision protecting all of the nesting places with but slight encroachment upon the woodlands there under private ownership; and the Percé Rock with a one-mile zone about it. Severe penalties are imposed for offenses against this law. After the perfection of this enact ment, an order was issued by the Governor General in Council (March 29) to the same effect so far as the Bird Sanctuaries are concerned, thus giving to the reservations a national recognition. The history of the movement which has led up to this result is not without its interest. About six years ago the anglers of the Gaspé district made joint allegation to the Ottawa government, regarding the depredations by the crested cormorant upon the salmon and trout pools. The indicted bird was accused of being the greatest enemy of the young of the fresh-water game fishes, and as the cormorant colony on the summit of Percé Rock is the only large nesting ledge of its kind on the coast, the game inspector, the late Commander William Wakeham, was officially ordered to destroy these birds. He made arrangements to carry out this order by having the Percé Rock sealed, the young birds killed, and the nests destroyed, although it is within my personal knowledge that he did this with utmost reluctance. It seemed then a proper time in which to enter a demurrer so far as could properly be done until the indictment against the cormorant could be tried out. Ornithologists were not at all dis THE NEW GASPÉ BIRD SANCTUARIES posed to unanimity in regard to the natural food of the crested cormorant, nor were they willing to grant that the indicted bird was guilty of the crimes laid at its door. In order to determine this matter and in view of a more official protest against the procedure referred to, the Ottawa order was rescinded until such time as the ornithologists of the Natural History Survey of Canada could enter upon and conclude an investigation of the habits of the cormorant. Mr. P. A. Taverner, with his assistants, was detailed to make a special study of this problem on the ground, and as a result of the inspection of the ingested food of these birds, he rendered judgment that the cormorant was not guilty. Mr. Taverner's examinations, however, extended much further than to a solution of this problem; he gave close attention to the other birds of the Percé colonies, and he, too, perceived and emphasized the adverse conditions under which the birds were maintaining their existence. The long campaign which has at last come to so fine fruition had for its effective conclusion the initiative of the Honorable Honoré Mercier, the Minister of Colonization, Mines and Fisheries for the Province of Quebec, and the provisions of the law were drawn by Mr. E. T. D. Chambers, of Quebec, 381 whose sympathy in this undertaking was of prime moment. I think it safe to say that the crested cormorant is the sacred bird which has saved the day for these St. Lawrence nesting places and, like many another martyr in a good cause, is itself alone left outside the pale of the protecting ægis. A black bird seems to have plenty of trouble under any of the protective laws. The Province of Quebec now has a great bird reserve of the most attractive sort. The Percé Rock and the Bonaventure Island cliffs are of themselves objects of great natural beauty. The Percé Rock is ever startlingly under the eye. Bonaventure Island lies. in the offing like a great green whale revealing nothing of its bird wonders to the man ashore. The boat trip around it beneath its sheer rock walls is the lifting of the veil to its most impressive feathered community. To the Bird Rocks of the Magdalens it is about 124 miles, into the heart of the gulf, a pleasant two-days' journey by boat from Percé with agreeable weather. Such a trip is not possible under present arrangement but it may be within the power of the Province which has gone thus far so well, to arrange such voyages over its great Marine Park. "Bird Rock" is about seven acres in area, with grassy top and weathered, precipitous sides. The lighthouse keeper and the birds together keep watch here at the entrance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence |