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.