Western Shores of the
Southeastern End of Hertford Island

The photos on this page, most of which were taken from the northeastern end of Hertford Island, show its western shores as they string out towards its southwestern end. Again, the overwhelming impression of this side of the island is of castle walls.

In photo #1, a cormorant is seen at the far right taking off as the tour boat gets to what it must have judged as too close; several other cor­mo­rants on the rocks at the far left just above the water look ready to follow its example (the in-flight cormorant was part of the group there). Another cor­mo­rant is in the air as well, but it is very hard to see against its background: look just to the left of the rounded pillar at the end of the island and you can pick out the glint of the sun on its wings. The small birds seen in the water are puffins; I can’t pick out any in the cliffs above, but, unless they are all in the water feeding, it’s likely that there are some there. The most numerous bird seen in this photo is the herring gull; they are visible nearly everywhere in this photo.

The grassy covering of the walls seen in photos #2 and #3 es­pe­cial­ly, but noticeable in all of the photos on this page, came as a surprise to me: the cliffs at the north­east­ern end are mostly just bare rock. It is certainly the case that grass grows there too, but not to the point of making the rock faces them­selves look green, as they surely do here. Left of centre in photo #2, a lush green plant is spread across the cliffs for a good distance: although the light doesn’t make them stand out, it is full of blooms. Now that you know they are there, you can find the same plant in photo #3, where the blooms are a bit easier to spot, at least if you look very closely. My best guess is that they are daisies, but I can’t make them out well enough, even under magnification in the original, to be cer­tain.

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In photo #4, which is a close-up of photo #3, you should be able to easily espy the herring gulls that are found along the cliff just below the grassy summit. I can readily make out eight of them in this compressed version; a few more are readily evident in the original. Once you know where to look, you can make them out in photo #3 as well, which has another sitting on an open rock ledge about a third of the way in from the left edge and an eighth of the way down from the top.

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Photo #5 was taken closer to the southwestern end of the island and gives a more detailed view of the southern end than the others on this page; the jutting rocky promontory first encountered when the tour boat approached the eastern shores of Hertford Island can now be seen at the far end of the island. Cape Dauphin Mountain and the northern shores of the Great Bras d’Or Massif are visible in the far distance. Except for the rock piles along the shore, which testify to cliffs that once stood further west than they do today, these cliff faces look fairly stable and not as badly eroded as they do at the north end of the island.

I am unable to pick out as many birds in this photo as further north. None of the white splotches on the cliff face are birds—under magnification in the original, they all prove to be patches of guano. Three herring gulls are relatively easy to pick out on the rocks above and away from the water; two cormorants are just above the water, one close to the water’s edge and the other (hard to see here) on the rock a fifth of the way in from the right edge of the photo. What looks to be a bald eagle under magnification in the original stands on a rock between the two cormorants, the rightmost of which has its beak (and doubtless its eyes) pointed directly towards the eagle.

What a very interesting shore this has been! And how privileged I have been to see it!