History & Wildlife of Eastern Newfoundland

Ten nights by hire car around eastern Newfoundland, and this is a wildlife itinerary first and a driving one second, with three boat trips doing the heavy lifting.

St John’s opens it, the oldest city in North America by some reckonings, with the painted row houses of Jellybean Row and Signal Hill above the harbour narrows.

Bay Bulls follows on the edge of the Witless Bay Ecological Reserve, which holds one of the largest Atlantic puffin colonies on the continent, several hundred thousand pairs nesting in burrows on the islands offshore. The same water is a humpback feeding ground, so the puffin and whale boat tour frequently delivers both, though neither can be promised and the puffins are only ashore from roughly May to August.

Trinity comes next, a historic outport of white clapboard houses on a peninsula, with another whale watch running from there. Twillingate closes the trip on the edge of what Newfoundlanders call Iceberg Alley, the drift path taken by bergs calved off Greenland glaciers, where ice that formed ten thousand years ago grounds in the bays each spring. The Iceberg Quest boat tour goes out among them, which is season-dependent and generally best in late May and June. Canadian Affair include the flights, the hire car, the hotels and all three boat tours, with fuel, insurance and meals separate. The price is per person. Timing matters more on this itinerary than on any other in their range, because the puffins and the icebergs overlap only briefly.