Our first day is complete and the weather looks good for us to get in the next many trips, which is great! It's been awhile since we've had a lucky spring for weather it seems. Today we found our first Great Shearwater of the season and had excellent views of it as it flew right by the boat on the shelf in the morning. Offshore we were lucky to find three Arctic Terns and at least one of them came right over us.
Some years we're lucky and we see the False Killer Whales, or Pseudorca crassidens, in the spring but they don't always coincide with a bird trip. Today we had a small pod and one individual came in to bow ride as they will do - what cool, acrobatic, and fast predators! So while we always are hoping we'll find a rare gadfly out there, sometimes the bird of the day is something entirely different. Here are a couple of videos I took from the bow:
Plus we had a group of Wilson's Storm-Petrels leave the slick for some natural food prey item this afternoon offshore of the shelf break! They were diving completely underwater to try to get pieces and while we saw it under the water...we have no idea what it was! Here is a Wilson's with a piece of it, a couple foraging over it, and the best we could do to capture it underwater.
For the list today please check out our eBird trip report: https://ebird.org/tripreport/526273 As we've done in the past we'll just post a few photos here and link the report for the totals. We'll see how well I keep up this year - as many of you know I can get a bit exhausted close to the end of our run and there might just be some photos and a link! Thanks to our leaders today - Brian Patteson, Daniel Irons, and Brent Stephenson. And thanks for reading!! Kate Sutherland
No comments:
Post a Comment