‘Heck of a lot of birds’: This N.B. group has been counting feathered fliers for 30 years

Point Lepreau Bird Observatory has been active for 30 years. (Source: Point Lepreau Bird Observatory)

It was winter 1963 and Jim Wilson was standing at the tip of Point Lepreau in southern New Brunswick, watching for birds. Behind him stood only trees and bushes as the famous nuclear generating facility had yet to be built. Before him stretched out the endless waves of the Bay of Fundy.

Wilson was participating in the Christmas Bird Count, an annual cross-Canada event that tracks the number of winged travellers in North America during the holiday season.

Thirty-two years later, the Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station was fully operational, which made it harder to get back to the tip overlooking the ocean. Thanks to a friend who worked at the facility, Wilson returned in the spring of 1995 and watched the birds flying up north along the bay.

“In the background, behind these flocks of birds, was an oil tanker that was empty coming back from Irving refinery up the bay,” Wilson said. “We looked at one another and wondered what would happen to these birds if there was an oil spill in the bay? Nobody would know how many birds would be affected.

“If we could, it’d be really nice to come to this strategic spot and start to monitor some of this migration.”

That thought evolved into the Point Lepreau Bird Observatory, a fixture on the edge of the Bay of Fundy that has tracked the seabirds that fly past New Brunswick for the last 30 years.

“We went to DNR for permission to put a little building out there,” Wilson said. “We were able to negotiate with them to have our building there, which has been renewed every five years. It comfortably holds four people at a time.”

Created by the Saint John Naturalists’ Club, the observatory examines the migration of birds during the fall and spring, counting the feathered flocks and saving the data. In the last three decades it has recorded more than 1.6 million seabirds.

“We count for 15 minutes and rest for15 minutes for a four-hour period,” Wilson said. “We’re doing a small sample, but we’re still counting thousands of birds. We counted 10,000 loons in spring 2024 and 13,000 loons in May 2025.

“That’s a heck of a lot of birds.”

Wilson said it was initially unclear why Point Lepreau offered such great views of the migration of seabirds. Over the years they’ve learned many of the birds spend their winters along the eastern seaboard as far down as Florida, and when it’s time to return to the north, they stick close to the seawater.

“They start moving and they follow the eastern seaboard,” he said. “A river of sea ducks and seabirds flowing northward. Some will peel off and go to Newfoundland, but a majority enter the Bay of Fundy and go around Grand Manan and go past Point Lepreau before going to the head of the bay and cross the Isthmus.

“We see the big flow in spring because the Bay of Fundy acts like a funnel.”

The observatory does not analyze its data, but it makes it available for researchers, helping them learn more about the birds that soar past New Brunswick.

Wilson noted the only other project similar to Point Lepreau on the eastern seaboard is the Avalon Seawatch in New Jersey.

“It’s very, very satisfying because it’s ongoing,” he said. “We never imagined that it would ever be more than a few years. It was never imagined to be on the scale it is. We’ve been doing this quietly for 30 years.

“We have everything in place to do what we do, we have volunteers who are good at what they do. All of that requires consistency.”

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