In the afternoon of June 29, 1833, John James Audubon entered Québec’s Wapitiguan Harbor aboard a sailing ship that he was chartering named Ripley. The harbor has since been mapped as a channel between Ȋle de Ouapitagone and smaller islands to the east. Near the entrance of the harbor, a small, flat, rocky island about a mile long was crowded with nesting Double-crested cormorants. Underneath the cormorants and the nests, the island was “completely white-washed” with excrement, the odor of which carried “to a great distance.”
John James Audubon and his fellow explorers distanced themselves from the cormorants and their white-washed island to explore the rest of Wapitiguan Harbor. While slipping and tripping over the moss-covered boulders and rocks around the harbor, Audubon almost stepped on a bird’s nest. Audubon was able to determine that the nest belonged to a Brown lark. The current common name for the Brown Lark is the American pipit. Audubon continued to notice the bird breeding further to the north in Labrador “very abundantly.” Audubon found the nest of the American pipit “usually placed at the foot of a wall of the rocks, buried in the dark mould [sic], and beautifully formed of fine bent grass, arranged in a circular manner, without any hair or other lining.” To this day, Québec is where the most American pipits gather (see eBird Checklist S50131118).