The last two days at Parc national du Bic have been delightful. The weather has been clear with highs in the 70s, lows in the 50s and low humidity. Great for exploring.
Yesterday was a bicycling day. There is a long smooth bike path called Le Portage that runs from our campground to the main visitor center. A further bike path called Le Grève runs out to Cap-à-l’Original past the La Rose des thés, a teahouse that can only be reached by biking or hiking. The round trip was listed as 16.9km (10.5 miles). We went that and further, taking a few side trails along the way.
It wasn't a quick trip as we were birding by bike, which meant stopping when something caught and ear or eye. We stopped a lot. It was a nice ride as the landscape was both open fields and woods with many views of the sea...and many views of the birds. The most common seemed to be White-throated Sparrows. They were always singing. Lots of singing Song Sparrows as well. We didn't see many different species, but we could hear many we couldn't identify.
After a stop at the visitor center, we arrived at the teahouse about lunchtime, but they didn't serve lunch, just beverages and pastries (and we hadn't brought lunch). We settled for a couple of french press coffees, a danish and really tasty maple syrup muffin. These were taken while sitting on the deck overlooking the Fleuve Saint-Laurent. After our repast, we continued on to the end of the bike path and took the short walk out to the view at Cap-à-l’Original. It was back on the bikes and the ride back to the campground for a relaxing afternoon after our 12.8 mile, 4hr 35min bird ride.
Today was a hiking day (Hiking for Birds?). We walked La Citadelle, a 4.7km trail through the woods that runs west from the campground and climbs to a northern view over the park looking out to the Saint Lawrence. From the end of that trail, we went north on La Colonie, a trail that winds 2 miles through open woods and meadows to the main visitor center. We finished by returning to the campground via a short walk along the beach and the same Le Portage bike trail as yesterday.
We covered nearly 9 miles and saw many more birds than yesterday, including a Boreal Chickadee, a life bird for Ellen (me, too). There were 29 species in all, with lots of warblers: American Redstart, Blackburnian, Magnolia, Northern Parula, and Ovenbird. Other notables were Red-breasted Nuthatch, Red-eyed and Blue-headed Vireos and a Red-throated Hummingbird deep in the woods...and, of course, the ubiquitous White-throated and Song Sparrows.
Most of La Citadelle was forest and even though Ellen considers it all alike (not her favorite terrain), it actually changed as we climbed from sea level to 450 ft. It was a mixed deciduous and pine forest all along, but tended towards mostly Birch at the lower levels. Pines and firs took over as we got higher and it reversed as we came back down.
Once again, we got to our turnaround point at lunch time, but this time, we remembered our lunch. On another deck overlooking the water, it was good old PB&J.
The (not very detailed) park trail map showed a trail running along the shore connecting to another to Mont Chocolat, which then connected to the bike trail. After lunch we decided to try that route back. We didn't find the Mont Chocolat trail, but cut back inland at what seemed to be an abandoned summer camp. All the buildings were there and in reasonable shape, even a church, but it looked like it had been unused for quite a while. We'd seen it from the bike path yesterday, so we knew that it would lead us to Le Portage. (It turned out that we had given up too early, since we passed the other end of the Mont Chocolat trail as we walked along the bike path.
After 9 miles and 7 hours, we made it back to the campground to be greeted by the last of the birds for the walk, Blue Jays at the campsite.
We also stopped at the campground office to extend our stay here another day. Tomorrow it's off to Rimouski to see the sights. We are heading to Parc national de la Gaspésie next. It is about 150 miles away and we'd like to take it easy getting there and not try to visit Rimouski and do the drive an the same day.
No photos yet. Wireless Internet is quite pricy here. We have a prepaid account with Virgin Mobile, but it only includes 250 MB per month with overage at 5¢ per MB. We'll try to upload some when we get to someplace with WiFi.
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