It seems our new location agrees with us! We had another successful run of trips at the end of the month with 17 pelagic species and ten species of tubenose over four days! Certainly a good set for those who were able to join us for all four trips.
Tuna are on the move and we had some amazing encounters with different species over the four trips 
plus got to see some awesome "beehives" or feeding flocks of shearwaters with mostly Sooty Terns overhead. The Bridled Terns have finally showed up and we encountered young of both species attending their parents in some of these mixed feeding flocks and along productive current edges with Sargassum.
Summer is such an awesome time to be offshore with all of the young of the year showing up! Most of the Sargasso Shearwaters we saw were nice, fresh juveniles already foraging on the species available in the Sargassum like this Planehead Filefish!
These youngsters in addition to some juvenile Black-capped Petrels always give me hope that our seabird species are going to survive into the future (in spite of some very challenging circumstances). Black-capped Petrels especially have many challenges and though they are listed as an Endangered Species here in the US, funding for programs at their breeding locations has been crippled by our current administration.
Just one of many things humans are doing to contribute to the decline of these gorgeous and resilient birds. As we have learned from the Cahow, aka Bermuda Petrel, they only need a little bit of help from us - they can do the rest themselves.
Summer is such an awesome time to be offshore with all of the young of the year showing up! Most of the Sargasso Shearwaters we saw were nice, fresh juveniles already foraging on the species available in the Sargassum like this Planehead Filefish!
In addition to young tubenoses, we also got to see some young jaegers with gorgeous, fresh plumage already beginning their lives of kleptoparasitism! We had young Parasitic Jaegers chasing Sooty Terns and had some Long-tailed Jaegers also chasing storm-petrels. The Wilson's we're seeing are a mixture of young of the year and adults. Though these youngsters have been alive a bit longer than our northern hemisphere tubenoses, most of whom fledged recently, the first year Wilson's are already molting to begin their journey south and the adults are ready to do so!
Great Shearwater youngsters also showed up earlier in the season with the first young of the year around in June. Now we're seeing some that are a bit messier looking and some adults that are finishing molt and looking stunning.
It's always amazing to me that the Gulf Stream is such a mixing place with birds from all over the globe either coming here or utilizing these waters at right times for them.
We are super lucky to be so close to the shelf break and this incredible confluence of waters with "the Point" right offshore from Oregon Inlet. The shelf break up here is quite different to what we had in Hatteras with very deep water close to the shelf...in Hatteras we had more of a slope, so the path to the deep water was more gradual. I imagine there is a lot to discover up here and this weekend we had a sighting on Saturday that made us scratch our heads...a rorqual out in the deep. In the hot, fast water of the Gulf Stream. It was super elusive and we didn't have a great look at it - I thought it was going to be a Minke Whale, it had the sort of fast moving, water pushing signature of one but we haven't seen them out in the Gulf Stream and it looked to be a little larger than that. Who knows? Perhaps a Bryde's Whale? We will never know but we'll keep looking and recording everything we find offshore here! We had more Goose-beaked Whales this set and a few unidentified beaked whales that could have been Gervais'. There is a lot of life east of Hatteras Island.
Okay...on to the rarities! We had two Trindade Petrels over the four day set, one distant dark morph on the 27th and another, more cooperative, light morph on the 29th.
Masked Booby was an excellent find on two of our trips the 27th and 30th.
We also had a juvenile Brown Booby on the 28th.
The most epic find came on the 29th when we encountered THREE White-faced Storm-Petrels on the shelf that morning! It was raining a bit as we checked out a condition on the shelf that morning and there were hundreds of Red-necked Phalaropes there. As we worked our way along this current edge we found one White-faced Storm-Petrel next to us on the line with the phalaropes
...then another was seen at the same time on the other side of the boat! Then yet another was spotted bounding along ahead of the boat!!! WOW! This is the most we've had on one of our trips and just one below the record for NC seen in a day. But also...it was the fifth week in a row we found one of the little Kangaroo Petrels!
What an epic month...
Thank you so much to everyone who joined us out there - these trips were all full and we had a really lovely group of people with us each day. Our leaders were also amazing and we thank Amanda Guciero and Elias Markee-Ratner for helping Brian, Daniel and I lead the trips. All photos today are mine. ~ Kate Sutherland
Species List 27 / 28 / 29 / 30 August 2026
Semipalmated Plover 0 / 0 / 1 / 0
Red-necked Phalarope 20 / 19 / 523 / 43
Lesser Yellowlegs 0 / 5 / 0 / 0
Semipalmated Sandpiper 0 / 1 / 0 / 0
Ruddy Turnstone 0 / 0 / 4 / 0
Long-tailed Jaeger 2 / 1 / 1 / 0
Parasitic Jaeger 2 / 3 / 3 / 4
Sooty Tern 151 / 98 / 31 / 57
Bridled Tern 17 / 14 / 19 / 10
Sooty / Bridled Tern 0 / 0 / 0 / 4
Least Tern 0 / 1 / 0 / 0
Black Tern 34 / 59 / 55 / 62
Common Tern 9 / 19 / 1 / 5
Royal Tern 0 / 13 / 0 / 0
Wilson's Storm-Petrel 324 / 289 / 251 / 159
White-faced Storm-Petrel 0 / 0 / 3 / 0
Band-rumped Storm-Petrel 4 / 0 / 0 / 0
Trindade Petrel 1 dark morph / 0 / 1 light morph / 0
Black-capped Petrel 27 / 24 / 152 / 65
Atlantic Cory's Shearwater 48 / 21 / 23 / 83
Scopoli's Shearwater 359 / 528 / 286 / 390
Cory's / Scopoli's 277 / 440 / 209 / 232
Great Shearwater 46 / 68 / 29 / 39
Manx Shearwater 0 / 0 / 1 / 0
Sargasso Shearwater 103 / 69 / 63 / 44
Masked Booby 1 / 0 / 0 / 1
Brown Booby 0 / 1 / 0 / 0
Brown Pelican 7 / 0 / 0 / 0
Barn Swallow 1 / 0 / 0 / 0
Prothonotary Warbler 1 / 0 / 0 / 0
Common Yellowthroat 1 / 0 / 0 / 0
American Redstart 1 / 0 / 0 / 0
peep sp 3 / 2 / 0 / 0
shorebird sp 15 / 1 / 0 / 12
jaeger sp 2 / 1 / 4 / 0
Offshore Bottlenose Dolphin 20 / 12 / 16 to 20 / 15 to 20
Atlantic Spotted Dolphin 70 to 90 / 42 to 47 / 7 to 12 / 0
Short-finned Pilot Whale 100 to 115 / 25 to 30 / 0 / 0
Goose-beaked Whale 5 to 6 / 0 / 9 to 13 / 0
beaked whale sp 0 / 2 to 3 poss M.eu / 0 / 2
rorqual sp 0 / 0 / 1 / 0
Leatherback Turtle 1 / 0 / 0 / 0
Ocean Sunfish (Mola mola) 2 / 0 / 0 / 0
Tiger Shark 0 / 0 / 1 / 0
Mahi mahi catch 1 / 0 / 0 / 1
Yellowfin Tuna catch 1 / 0 / 0 / 4
