Usually the keeper of the Bird Rock Light is a Madeleiner from Grindstone or House Harbour. Once, spending a week at Havre Maison we boarded with a widow whose husband had been a keeper of this lighthouse. Graphic indeed were her tales of the weirdness, loneliness and yet fascination of the life. She told, too, what happiness was theirs on seeing the first birds coming in the spring.
CHAPTER XII.
PERCÉ.
O visible connections exist between the faraway Iles des Madeleine and Percé, between Mai Baie and Baie des Chaleurs; but, in the fact that both the Bird Rocks and Percé Rock have been selected as summer homes and nesting-places by those beautiful creatures of the air, the wild sea-birds, there is a certain psychological bond of the deepest nature.
Percé Rock, according to surveyors, is fourteen hundred feet long and three hundred feet high at the highest end. It is a rock that carries in its sharp, almost cutting lines, an air of great dignity and strong personality. It is outstanding. People speak of it as “The Rock”, as if nowhere around this rocky coast there were any other like unto it. And there is not. Along the Gulf it is a landmark; along the entire Gaspé shore a dominating character.
In itself it is barren and without life, more than a stunted scrub of tree and a little sprinkling of green at one place on the top. Its almost vertical sides are of a metallic, coppery hue. Its heart is burnt out. Geologically it is a mausoleum, a grave, wherein millions of trilobites were buried and turned to stone in that far away age to which the trilobite belongs. Yet it is this great heart of stone that the seabirds have undertaken to warm and have succeeded in making a thing of life, with mother hearts and baby cries, and the flashing wings of their constant coming and going.
The bird life here is a sort of commonwealth, in which the magnificent cafe-au-lait colours of the gannet predominate. “Watching the birds” is one of the pastimes indulged in by all visitors to Percé. And there seem to be more and more people here every year just “watching the birds”.
With a powerful telescope you can see mothers feeding the young mouths in the seaweed nests. You can see them teaching the A. B. C. of flying to youngsters yet in their pin-feathers. And you can see them on the day they almost push their young to their first take-off. And when they have taught the nestlings to fly, they must, having conquered the air, begin all over again on that even more difficult element, the water.
Out there beyond the Government Pier which the mother does not mind in the least, having somehow sensed that the same parental hand behind the old piers holds her and her brood in its protecting palm, (both Ottawa and Washington are pledged to the protection of these wild birds of the sea), she gives her brood their first swimming-and-diving lessons and afterwards, almost without telling, they learn “to fish” for themselves.