Newfoundland is home to North America’s largest puffin colony—Witless Bay Ecological Reserve, with a population of approximately 260 thousand pairs. As far as I can tell, it is also home to its largest accumulation of puffin objects.
Puffin1 images are inescapable, plastered over every souvenir shop alongside other “Newfoundland” iconography: dogs, mummers, ugly sticks, pitcher plants, lighthouses, dories, whales, and chipper Newfoundland English vernacular language on t-shirts, keychains, mugs, and more.
These objects cater to a tourist imaginary, and by virtue of it, have nesting-doll-style relationships to place. On Water Street—the front lines of St. John’s cruise ship reception—puffins appear alongside Canadiana: as stuffed toys they may have beavers as neighbours or hold tiny bottles of (made-in-Quebec) maple syrup. The further you go from town, the more provincial and specific the souvenirs become: puffins wearing tiny sou’westers, puffins with an outline of the island embroidered on their feet, puffins with tricolour Newfoundland flag bills.
In Elliston, once aptly named Bird Island Cove, you can watch puffins at the local viewing site, have a seat on the world’s largest puffin Adirondack chair, and then purchase the world’s smallest puffin Adirondack chair. My favourite souvenir from my research is a simple white mug with the phrase “Love me like an Atlantic puffin” printed on it. I have no idea what that means. Monogamously until death in our hometown, maybe.
Ecotourism dominates Newfoundland summers, with visitors travelling from all over the world to spot humpbacks, hike its famous trails, and touch twelve-thousand-year-old ice. Boat tours in Witless Bay Ecological Reserve, about a forty-minute drive south of St. John’s, provide viewing access to all sorts of marine life, including puffins, turr, kittiwakes, and other seabirds.
Seabirds have always been part of settler interest in this place—early European colonists fuelled their conquests by decimating breeding colonies like those of the now-extinct Great auk (Pinguinnus impennis, “plump without flight feathers”)—but the puffin phenomenon is fairly new.
Puffin tourism as we know it began in Witless Bay Ecological Reserve in 1985, when a group of local families in the nearby town of Bay Bulls convened to brainstorm how to survive the economic devastation of the dwindling cod fishery, from which they had previously earned their livings. Using their fishing vessels and knowledge of the local environment, they harnessed existing resources into a venture that would allow the community to stay intact. Among them were the O’Briens and the Gatheralls, who endure as the largest tour operators, both still family-run.
Tours of the puffin colony are full productions. On the way to and from the islands over a hundred passengers enjoy the onboard bar, live music, and often a screech-in ceremony, where performers ask “come-from-aways” to go through a series of actions to look, speak, and drink “like a Newfoundlander.” The well-known version of the ceremony concludes with the initiated kissing a frozen cod. On the Witless Bay boats, it ends with kissing a tiny stuffed puffin (available for purchase in the gift shop).
To be a “screecher” in Newfoundland is conditional upon being woven into the fabric of the culture. The success of the ceremony hinges on the audience’s trust that the screecher is an old timer, based on how convincingly the performer stages their own identity. At many ecotourism venues interpreters activate the site by sharing scientific understandings of their ecological context. Here, they must additionally be—or be perceived to be—embedded in the place in order to deliver the experience tourists expect. It is a stylized ecoperformance, which grounds an unmoored audience in a version of the traditional knowledge of their new surroundings.2
The now-puffin seascapes of coastal Newfoundland are highly burdened places. As any Newfoundlander would tell you, Newfoundland’s long-shaped socioeconomic interspecies relationship is without a doubt with cod, not puffins. An industrial cod seascape has become a puffin tourism seascape. This destination, like all destinations, tells one motivated story of many.
It is a true one—of local ingenuity and resilience, strong community bonds to each other and the environment. There are also other true stories: in all the time I have spent in ecotourism contexts in Newfoundland over the past few years only rarely has it been discussed that the aforementioned screech rum arrived in Newfoundland from the Caribbean in trade for the island’s salt cod, which was used to feed a host of global injustices including the transatlantic slave trade. And only rarely has there been mention of the island’s Indigeneity. The lands and waters of the island of Ktaqmkuk/Newfoundland are the ancestral and unceded home of the Beothuk and Mi’kmaq, as well as interrelated communities of plants, animals, rocks, currents, and winds. Beothuk people and their language were violently and deliberately destroyed by members of the settler colonial project which became Canada. Of the few words documented in settler archival records, one is the name for puffin: gwoshuawit.
Puffins occupy cultural space across their geographic range; they appear in foodways and stories all over the North Atlantic. A similar puffin tourism phenomenon occurs in Iceland, where many locals see the puffin craze as artificial. Puffins are migratory, and while present in Iceland, do not feature prominently in their folklore. Icelandic academics Lund, Kjartansdóttir, and Loftsdóttir argue that this phenomenon coincides with the creation of Iceland’s tourist identity and represents a charismatic image of nature to tourists, primarily white, middle-class, affluent, and green-thinking tourists, who want to connect with the “real arctic.”
Neither Iceland nor Newfoundland is geographically arctic, but both have similar resource extraction histories associated with cold remote landscapes. The authors argue that in Iceland “tourists improvise an Arctic landscape that is “without the ‘burden’ of the complex network of socio-economic conditions that shape it,” have long shaped it and continue to do so. They are surrounded by materials that give them a glimpse into a complex history but are not enmeshed in the everyday, grounded activities and discourses” of place.3
By virtue of being a contemporary point of attention, puffins are simple. They are nearly universally adored. Susie Meadows, the head interpreter at the Audubon Seabird Institute in Bremen, Maine—whose puffins were reintroduced from pufflings from Witless Bay after localized extinction—told me, “if I had a nickel for every time I heard someone say puffins were cute? I could retire.” Their cuteness also deeply affects their conservation: fellow auks, Common and Thick-billed murre, both known locally as turr, are still widely hunted in the province, a heritage practice that was exempted from the Migratory Birds Act after Newfoundland joined confederation in 1949.
There is no shortage of birds in Newfoundland folklore, nearly every native species has vernacular names, and knowing their behaviours is a tool in foretelling the infamously unpredictable weather. In the post-cod ecotourism period, puffins have drifted from that folkloric context into new waters, where the living birds play host to those in search of authentic Newfoundland cultural experiences, and their likenesses migrate elsewhere as icons of this iteration of the seascape.
Featured Image: Group of puffins through binocular lens at Cape Bonavista Light, Bonavista. August 10, 2024.
Notes
[1] The Atlantic ocean’s only native puffin species is the Atlantic puffin—Fratercula arctica or “little brother of the north.” They are called sea parrots, hatchet bills, and clowns in Newfoundland folk taxonomies. We have other native auks, but puffins are the only species with that signature colourful bill, so luckily their folk taxonomical classification overlaps with their Linnean one. Everyone calls them puffins, rather than Atlantic puffins, so I do, too.
[2] Ecoperformativity “highlights the ways that people make use of traditional expressive resources to capture and convey knowledge about the natural environment and to exert influence on processes that threaten their community’s connection to land and locale.” The concept was proposed by the Diverse Environmentalisms Research Team (DERT). John Holmes McDowell, Katherine Borland, Rebecca Dirksen, and Sue Tuohy, Performing Environmentalisms: Expressive Culture and Ecological Change (University of Illinois Press, 2021), 22.
[3] Ashlee Joyce, “Reclaiming the Dérive: The Tourist, the Souvenir and the Search for the Utopic,” in The Word Hoard 1, no. 3 (2015): 117, quoted in Katrín Anna Lund, Katla Kjartansdóttir, and Kristín Loftsdóttir, “Puffin Love: Performing and Creating Arctic Landscapes in Iceland Through Souvenirs.” Tourist Studies 18, no. 2 (2018): 154.
Chloe Lundrigan