Click photo to see complete painting

Thick-billed Murre

Status Common in winter. Occurs regularly from early December to April, occasionally both earlier and later. Single birds at Brier Island on 20 September 1972 and at Cherry Hill, Lunenburg County, on 6 October 1979 were unusually early arrivals. The main spring passage takes place during the second half of April, although there are a few May records and an active bird was seen off Sable Island on 14 June 1979. They are more common on offshore waters than near the coast, except when driven ashore by storms, when they may be picked up dead or exhausted, sometimes at a considerable distance inland. Large numbers are regularly seen near Brier Island during Christmas Bird Counts the highest estimate was 20,000 birds on 20 December 1973. Banding has shown (Tuck 1961) that Thick-billed Murres from colonies in Greenland, and from Lancaster Sound and Hudson Strait in the Canadian Arctic, all winter off southern Newfoundland; the birds visiting Nova Scotia are probably from all three areas.

Description Length: 43-48 cm. Adults in summer: Head and neck dark seal-brown; back and wings black; entirely white below. Adults in winter: Upperparts same as in summer but front and sides of neck white.

Range Breeds on rocky cliffs around the Polar Basin and south to Newfoundland, southern Greenland and Iceland, and in the North Pacific. In eastern North America, winters at sea off Newfoundland, western Greenland and, to a lesser extent, Nova Scotia. The eastern Canadian population is about 1,300,000 pairs, of which only 11,000 breed at the southern edge of the range, in Newfoundland and the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Remarks (For further notes on the Thick-billed Murre, see the Common Murre.) Irregularly, in late autumn or winter, numbers of murres are found dead or in weakened condition along the coast or inland, victims of heavy gales with which they were unable to cope successfully, presumably because they were too close to shore when overtaken by the storm. In my experience, surprisingly, all such casualties are of the Thick-billed species. One of these unfortunates was found lying helpless on a lawn at Coldbrook, Kings County, on 14 December 1969, weak from starvation. It was soon released in the Cornwallis River at Port Williams, the nearest salt water. A passing Great Black-backed Gull, detecting the disability, attacked almost immediately, but the murre adeptly dived. The muddy water of the receding tide favoured the murre because the gull was unable to follow the weakened bird's course. After several unsuccessful attempts to catch it when it would briefly surface, the gull gave up and the murre was last seen heading downstream for the open coast.