Pelagic Birding

Skua. Fulmar. Petral. Shearwater. To the casual birder, these names may sound more like ancient beasts of some sort, but they are pelagic type bird groups highly sought after by avid birders. The term pelagic refers to deep water areas of open ocean, at the edge of or beyond the continental shelf. Last week, I had the opportunity to join such a trip leaving from Westport on the Washington Coast. About a dozen of these trips per year are sponsored by an outfit called Westport Seabirds, that has been conducting these trips for about 30 years.

As John Steinbeck said in his "Travels with Charlie", if Montana had a seacoast, it would be the finest place in the world to live. Having been raised spending much time on the Chesapeake Bay and Atlantic Coast, I do miss not having an ocean nearby here in Montana. So the opportunity to combine a birding trip with an open ocean experience is one that I relish. And this trip fulfilled those desires.

We left port just before sunrise on the "Monte Carlo", a boat of about 60 feet or so in length. As the boat's name might imply, birding is no sure thing, and although my hopes were high as usual, locating target bird species is always a gamble. My target for the day was a South Polar Skua. The outgoing tide at the inlet made for a pretty rough entry to the ocean - but that really felt good to me. The waters of the ocean were calmer with swells in the 7-8 foot range. Bird action began pretty quickly with a Leach's Storm-Petral, and Sooty Shearwaters were soon sighted gracefully skimming over the surface of the swells. And then there were Pink-footed and Buller's Shearwaters. We headed well off shore toward a commercial fishing boat that usually attracts large numbers of seabirds, but it was not as productive as expected because of the type of fish it was after. However, our first Black-footed Albatross of the day was nearby.After reaching the Gray's Canyon area, about 40 miles off shore, the crew did some chumming to see what other species we could attract. Species such as Northern Fulmars, a Fork-tailed Storm-Petral, more albatrosses and several Jaeger species appeared but none in great numbers. I should mention here that the expert birders who always accompany these trips really are good! Their abilities to sight birds and ID them from long distances are exceptional and likely come from the many years that they have spent on the oceans in this type of endeavor. One of the non-birding highlights of the trip occurred on our way back to shore. Two small pods of Humpback Whales were sighted, although they were not especially cooperative at surfacing near the boat.

One note of caution! Seasickness can result from either physical or probably mental causes. About a half dozen folks on the boat were unfortunate enough to be the victims of this malaise. So prepare yourself! Specific remedies and medications seem to work for some individuals and not others, so one must experiment to see what works for them. This poor chap is NOT praying! I happen to be fortunate enough to get by with no medications, although I must admit that the mental aspects sometimes make me a little queezy.

Not too far from the inlet, someone on the bow of the the boat yelled "Skuas". Since that was my target bird for the day, I hurried up to the bow and got a look at them thru my binoculars and then took some pictures - that turned out to be quite mediocre. I should mention here that taking quality pictures of fast flying birds while trying to keep from falling in a rolling boat is quite a challenge. And I was not very successful in meeting that challenge - as evidenced by the marginal quality of the bird images I took.

While we didn't see large numbers of birds for the day, nor anything especially rare, it was a great trip and one that I hope to repeat each year while visiting daughter Melissa and family near Seattle.