Good morning chorusers! Hopefully this diary will arrive at the appropriate time. I’m setting my alarm to get up at six and check and also republish to B&BW as there seems to be problems with the automatic publishing.
Four weeks ago (seems like a lot longer now) I went on a pelagic trip with Westport Seabirds from the coastal town of Westport, Washington along with kossack Pandala who was going on her first pelagic since the 1970s. Along with Milly Watt I’d been on a trip on the same boat in late June of last year. This offered an opportunity to see the same habitat in a different season. In this diary I’m just going to show the birds we saw and I will diary the other organisms in a Daily Bucket in the near future. Milly’s diary about the 2014 trip is here and mine is here.
The previous diaries have a lot of text about the nature of the trip and the types of birds to be seen. I’m just going to post a bit about seasonal differences and then plunge into the pictures. This was the last trip of the season (stormy weather makes late fall or winter trips impractical — large numbers would get cancelled). It had been scheduled for Oct. 10 but bad weather that weekend caused it to be postponed to the 17th. This was a good plan as it turned out; the weather on the 17th was pretty good. Not very sunny as you can see, especially in the early part of the day, but the sea was pretty calm* and the temperature was reasonable for season. And it only sprinkled a little bit. The captain said it was quite remarkable as they had had to cancel several trips in September and when they had gone out it had been quite rough.
*Calm is a relative term. There is always some swell but it was fairly small most of the time.
Some of the pelagic birds can be seen pretty much throughout the ‘season’ (March through October) but others are more seasonal. Buller’s Shearwater (alas no pictures) was completely absent on the July trip but was seen several times this October. In contrast we saw no storm petrels of any kind on this trip. Other fall birds are arctic breeders such as skuas and jaegers. No pictures of them either as they tend to fly by at high speed affording only a brief glimpse. The most abundant bird on our trip was easily the Northern Fulmar seen en masse and in portrait above. I think we saw four of these birds on the July trip and 10,000 plus on this trip.
The next most conspicuous bird species was black-footed albatross. These are the largest regularly seen birds on north Pacific trips. Like the fulmars they approach ships although they are a bit less bold.
My life bird for the day was this short-tailed shearwater. It very cooperatively sat in the water close to the boat but directly in front of the sun. We saw a number of the very similar sooty shearwater but I didn’t get any useable photos.
The most common shearwater on the trip was the pink-footed shearwater.
All of the above are ‘tubenoses’, members of the order Procellariiformes. They are exclusively oceanic birds with specialized salt-excreting glands inside their enlarged nostrils. We also saw some alcids (puffins and relatives) including many rhinoceros auklets and common murres as well as a smaller number of Cassin’s auklets (this species has suffered mass mortality in the last year or so. The puffin below was the only one seen (they are not seen very often away from breeding colonies).
We saw large numbers of birds (individuals) in part because the calm sea made visibility better but also because of the large number of fishing boats in the area.
I’ll finish up with a few images from our return to harbor at Westport. On the previous trip the waves had been smashing into the breakwater with ten foot waves, you can see how calm it was this time.