Hunting ‘Turr’ in Newfoundland’s Frigid Waters (original) (raw)

Americas|Hunting ‘Turr’ in Newfoundland’s Frigid Waters

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/04/world/americas/hunting-turr-in-newfoundland-frigid-waters.html

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Bonavista Journal

Dec. 4, 2016

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Along Newfoundland’s coast, hunters rise before dawn and motor their boats out into the open sea in search of turr, a migratory seabird.Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times

BONAVISTA, Newfoundland — Shannon Mouland steadied himself in an aluminum boat, shotgun raised, as a thick-billed murre skittered above the slate-gray waters of the North Atlantic.

Boom! And the bird cartwheeled into the sea.

It’s “turr” season on The Rock, as this massive inkblot of an island is affectionately known. Turr is the local name for the murre, which looks something like a diminutive, flying penguin, and men in boats are blasting away at it in the only legal, non-aboriginal hunt of migratory seabirds in North America.

The pastime harks back to the days when Newfoundlanders supplemented meager winter diets with fresh meat on the wing, eating everything from clownish puffins to the great northern gannet. Conservation efforts gradually put most of the island’s estimated 350 seabird species off limits. But the taste for turr was so entrenched that allowing the hunt to continue became a precondition for Newfoundland to join Canada in 1949.

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Scott Butler shooting a turr. Most are hunted to provide winter meat for local families; selling the birds is illegal.Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times

“Our fathers would come back with the boats piled high with turr,” Mr. Mouland recalled, gripping a green rope to steady himself as the boat hammered over the steely waves.

Here along Newfoundland’s treeless, surf-pounded coast, hardy men (and some women) rise before dawn and motor their boats out into the open sea in search of the birds that come to feed on small forage fish. They are remarkable animals, spending most of their lives on the ocean and visiting land only to pack tightly together on the rocky cliffs of northeastern Canada and Greenland for a few months each summer while the females lay their one speckled blue egg. The eggs are pointed on one end so that they roll like a top in a tight circle, preventing them from falling off cliff ledges and into the sea.

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