“Sold a story!” I told a friend who will remain nameless.

“Is it about birds?” he asked. The last two stories I sold were about birds – “Invasive Species”, which I’m sure you’re all sick of hearing about (even though it is awesome) and “Face Like a Monkey”, which may or may not be about a vagrant melanistic Jabiru and will appear in the Datlow/Mamatas anthology Haunted Legends – so I can see where he might have though he had me figured.

And yes, yes he does; yes it is. Specifically, it is about the Black-legged Kittiwake in this post. (Scroll down.) It’s also about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and the sometimes-awkward moment when you go from being a birder to being an environmentalist – or fail to. Plus autocannibalism.

Look for it in the April/May/June 2010 issue of ChiZine if all goes well.

Today is a day that I’ve been eagerly anticipating.  Over the last 10 years I’ve spent hundreds of hours leading pelagic trips in the North Sea, and observing and photographing seabirds from angling charter boats, but they’ve been almost entirely between the months of July and September.

So, heading out during the winter months is something special.  We really don’t have a clue what’s out there at this time of the year.  Which is what today’s trip is about.  My background is in scientific research so, when I was asked if I would like to undertake a systematic seabird and cetacean survey of offshore Northumberland, agreeing to do this was a bit of a no-brainer really.  The other intriguing thing is how far offshore we’re going.  On most of the surveys it’s going to be twice as far as we would reach on one of our usual pelagics, and on a couple of them it’s going to be even further.

We’re likely to have a few spaces available on most of the surveys, and we’re offering them at a bargain price of £20/person/trip, so if you’re interested in joining us then get in touch and we’ll put you on our mailing list to be contacted whenever it looks like a weather window will allow us to take the boat out.

Excited?  I certainly am.

Heermann's Gull-Victoria-17/Oct/09

Today is my birthday and what better way to spend it than joining the Victoria Natural History Society for a mini-pelagic to Race Rocks. I traveled down to Victoria with Guy Monty and boarded the boat at 09:30am. The weather was terrible with rain all the way there. Once aboard the boat it didn’t get much better though the sea was calm. We spent approximately five hours looking for pelagic specialties. We got a good selection of Auklets, Murres, Loons,gulls and shorebirds though the

Pink-footed Shearwater-Victoria-17/Oct/09

best for me was getting 7 PINK-FOOTED SHEARWATERS. This was a BC bird for me as I had only seen them in Washington on the Westport Pelagic.

Rich Mooney

Parksville BC

The headline says Greedy Dogfish Blamed for Mass. Fishery’s Problems.

But the article points out that the spiny dogfish, a small shark species only now recovering from decades of overfishing, is not regarded as the problem by most scientists and regulators. The complaint of the fisherfolk seems to be that the dogfish, or any species that isn’t H. sapiens, has the temerity to eat any fish at all.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because the same charges of greed and demands for suppression have been leveled at sea lions, cormorants, orcas… and on and on. And yet, oddly, in all these situations, the only common factor is humankind – human overfishing, human pollution, and in some cases invasive species introduced by humans.

So who’s really the greedy one?

Well?

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This was the day of the albatrosses. They followed us for miles, nine of them all told, as we headed as far west as you can get and still be in the ABA area. All Black-footed. Not to say that there was no variety; while most were the expected immature birds, one persistent individual was an adult with an uncomfortable-looking bum foot. While an albatross doesn’t use its feet much in everyday life, we could only imagine that this would make breeding a challenge.

That albatross stayed with us for a while; Todd got some good shots.

Note the awkward angle of the leg

Same bird, in flight

...and landing

Also, there were shearwaters. And storm-petrels. And storm-petrels. And shearwaters. Everyone scanned the horizon; everyone braced against the waves; everyone was slowly dessicated by the wind and sun. Shearwaters. Petrels. And always the albatrosses.

We still had the company of the Common Dolphins, but other than that mammals were entirely absent. Or maybe we just didn’t see them, because at some point around lunch it became apparent to all that we still hadn’t seen a tropicbird of any description and we’d better keep our eyes to the skies. All we spotted up there, alas, were several annoying airplanes. Indeed, no new birds of any description were turning up, only those shearwaters and storm-petrels, a single Red-necked and Red Phalarope and a handful of Arctic Terns and Common Terns with a handful of distant jaegers to harass them. We stared at the sky. The sun sucked the moisture from our eyeballs. And then, treacherously, it began to slip down the side of the sky.

The albatrosses didn’t seem to notice our growing desperation, except inasmuch as we chummed all the more frantically.

Yum!

The plan was to reach our anchor for the night at the Sixty-Mile Bank and then lay out everything we had left by way of fish-oil and popcorn and see what we could lure in. But the sun moved fast, and the ship, dawdling in hopes of finding those tropicbirds, moved slow. The light was slanted and the shadows profound by the time the last scraps of chum went overboard in a shallow bit of ocean where sea lions were at play. Storm-petrels came closer, looking more like bats than ever in the dusk… and then a single Brown Booby sailed across our wake, providing brief but clear looks and a last life bird for me!

And so, with a sunset out of legends, we admitted at last that the day was done.

Myself and the Inimitable Todd

Big ups to Searcher Natural History Tours, and to leaders Todd McGrath, Ned Brinkley, and Dave “Chum-Master Dave” Povey, who displayed an uncanny Zen-like skill at keeping birds who should know better interested in popcorn. I couldn’t have had a better vacation in any way, shape, or form…

And technically, my vacation wasn’t over yet.

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Other People’s Albatrosses?

While I painstakingly craft the stunning conclusion of the Pelagic-O-Rama, I wanted to give a nod to some interesting research that’s been circulating in the birdblogosphere, in which a team of canny ornithologists attached cameras to Black-browed Albatrosses in order to discover more about what they do when they’re not following ships. Turns out that a camera on the back of an albatross will get a lot of pictures of the ocean (not surprising) and a few pictures of other albatrosses and of killer whales, which the birds may follow in hopes of scraps much as they follow us.

The paper.

The pictures.

H/T Corey at 1000birds.com and John from A DC Birding Blog

So I had seen my albatross, resplendent in the sunset. But the Inimitable Todd had missed it! Worse, he’d also missed the one that flew over the boat just before breakfast. The Inimitable Todd was beginning to think that albatrosses were all some big birder in-joke. Possibly a conspiracy. It was putting a stress fracture in our relationship – after all, counselors say that after money and kids the number one cause of break-ups is a life list mismatch. (I think I heard that somewhere, anyway.)

You’d think an albatross would be hard to miss. Especially as the birds were thinning out. There were still Buller’s Shearwaters in plenty, along with a few Pink-footeds and Sooties. There were still storm-petrels, nearly all Leach’s – but as I mentioned, this didn’t mean that they were all the same bird; this would be the only day that we’d see all the expected races, including the nominate. But overall, this was not the rich and hectic world of our last two days. It was, instead, a place to scan the sea and air for the shier, rarer Pacific wanderers, the birds that think nothing of commuting to South America or even Australia, the larger petrels, the tropicbirds, and, of course, the albatrosses.

After the previous day’s total cetacean bliss-out, we had to be eased back into sea-mammal watching with a few distant Fin and Blue Whales as we chugged over the Rodriguez Dome into the deep water on the other side of the continental shelf. We also encountered dolphins, both our old friends the Common Dolphins (Long and Short-beaked) and the Pacific White-sided Dolphin.

Common Dolphins are total morning people

We scanned the skies, looking for rarities, trailing a magnificent slick of chum and waiting for the rarities to come.

And waiting.

And waiting.

The waiting was neither unexpected nor entirely unpleasant. Eventually some albatrosses showed themselves satisfactorily to the Skeptical Inimitable Todd (although not to his camera). More Leach’s Storm Petrels. More Buller’s Shearwaters. Skuas, and all the Jaegers. Lots of waves.

Someone shouted that they saw a Murrelet! The engines were cut at once and we tried to sneak up on it. Unfortunately, it is very hard for a 95-foot boat to sneak up on a 10-inch bird in the open ocean. It flushed, and when it landed it dove, and that was it for any hopes of seeing the Xantus’s Murrelet (for such it was. Or so I was told.)

The Guadalupe Fur Seals were a bit more obliging. Perhaps being thought extinct has prompted them to be more forthcoming, or perhaps it’s just that they’re easier to see. Either way, we spotted 22, of the roughly 10,000 that now exist. That’s more than there are of Xantus’s Murrelet, by the way.

An Arctic Tern paused on its annual journey across the face of the globe and let us all get a look. Another Xantus’s Murrelet popped up, this time allowing a brief but countable look (at the determination that it was of the scrippsi subspecies.)

Then it was back to practicing our birdwatching Zen. Again, I say this not to complain. There’s a whole lot of Pacific Ocean, as I’ve been pointing out in a variety of hopefully entertaining ways. And it’s impossible to predict which bits of it will have birds and mammals on at any particular time.

Still, our job would have been easier were humans not constantly driving ocean species to the edge of extinction (let alone over it.)

More terns, more petrels. And just before the dinner call, more Murrelets; subspecies hypoleucus this time, a pair that peeped to each other even as they wound up on either side of the boat. With the engine cut, their calls were clear above the wind and waves and the sound of excited birders rushing from rail to rail. Xantus’s Murrelets are believed to be monogamous, and these two certainly seemed eager to stay together, though even the waves were bigger than them. We watched them for a long time, from our perches above the water. And when they finally flew away, I only hoped that they would be able to find each other again quickly, their life lists perhaps both up by one species of bipedal mammal.

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Pacific barracuda, Sphyraena argentea (Girard, 1854), aka Southern California barracuda and silver barracuda. They can be distinguished from Mexican barracuda, Sphyraena ensis, by its silvery sides and a general lack of bars or spots. Pacific barracudas are slender, predatory fish with  fang-like teeth that cover a large mouth and a protruding lower jaw.

Pacific Barracuda from southern California

Man-of-war Fish (Nomeus gronovii)

The Man-of-War Fish range in warm tropical waters in various parts of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans.The Man-of-War Fish gets its name from the fact that it often lives among the deadly stinging tentacles of the Portuguese man-of-war.

There is no doubt the Man-of-War Fish gets his name from living among the stinging tentacles of the Portuguese Man of  War…with plenty of protection and probaly helps the man-of-war as well by enticing other fish to swim among the tentacles.

As the boat rocked gently on the vast, prolific, pulsating ocean, I lay in my bunk and tried to do some reading. I’d brought along Seven Tenths by James Hamilton-Paterson, a lyrical (though sometimes a tiny bit precious) elegy for the abused and demystified oceans of the world.

I couldn’t help but think of the whales. I knew, of course, intellectually, that whales are big, and so is the ocean. But actually experiencing the difference in scale between these creatures, this environment, and my puny little self…. Consider. Some whales can live to be 200 years old, maybe older, we don’t know. They have complex social structures. And at their respective nadirs, there were only an estimated 5,000 Humpbacks and less than 2,000 Blue Whales in the world.

So some of those whales we met, might very well have had friends and relatives killed by humans. Yes, this is shameless anthropomorphism. But in the case of these long-lived cetaceans, as with other highly social animals, it hardly seems out of place to think that they could have such bonds in their own right, not just as a way of being honorary humans. Certainly, they can learn. Certainly, they can remember. Yet very few whales have ever offered violence to humans even when they could have got clean away with it.

And they could have. The other thing that struck me as I lay in my bunk was how very not-solid the water was, how things could sink in it, how very much irreversible it was if one were to lose a book or a pair of glasses or an Inimitable Todd or a self overboard in a moment of carelessness. Or even a boat if it were to sink. The Pacific Ocean, for those of you who have not seen it, is a whole lot of water.

The rocking of the boat did not change. It was still gentle, still steady. It was just, suddenly, less soothing.

The whales think I should be less angsty

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After a pleasant night of sleep (I don’t think all the other birders enjoyed it as much as I did) we woke up heading for the Channel Islands. At first, the birdlife was very similar to the first day’s, with fewer but still present Brown Pelicans, another Skua, several Pomarine Jaegers and numerous shearwaters, including our first Buller’s (lifer).

Buller’s Shearwater is one of those interesting species that doesn’t align well with our land-based sense of what makes a bird rare or not-rare; they’re abundant, but far out at sea so that most people rarely lay eyes on them. And although they range over the whole Pacific, their breeding colonies are clustered tightly enough that a rapid-fire series of relatively local disasters could do the whole population serious harm. So they’re considered a vulnerable species, even as we saw over 200 on our trip.

As we bore towards the southernmost island we were briefly accompanied by a pod of Risso’s Dolphins and spotted a Northern Fur Seal doing that weird Fur Seal thing where they stick their flippers out of the water in a loop and point them skywards to thermoregulate – I initially mistook it for a floating tire.

Fur Seal, no longer cunningly disguised as a tire

Also numerous as we neared the islands were phalaropes; mostly Red-necked, a species that I had the good fortune to see at Jamaica Bay a couple years back, but also a small group of Red. Red was the last species I needed to complete the phalarope trifecta! Phalaropes are my second-favorite group of birds, so that was a big moment for me. Shortly thereafter yet another lifer hove into view in the slim dark form of an aptly-named Pelagic Cormorant.

The captain detected a temperature break in the channel – a place where two currents collided, creating an upwell of water and little specks of organic matter from the deep. Birds regard such places as buffets, and the whitish band of foam on the water was flocked over by more phalaropes, gulls, and cormorants. We headed that way in hope of more new birds. Here I picked out the formerly-elusive Leach’s Storm-Petrel at last; the first individual, and most of the rest we would see, were among the dark-rumped subspeceiseseseses (Leach’s Storm-petrel taxonomy is, shall we say, somewhat in flux; the species may be in for multiple splits based on little things like the fact that various subspecies are known to breed on the exact same island and yet remain sharply genetically distinct due to differences in the breeding season etc.)

Another Sabine’s Gull was in the mix, along with the trip’s first Common Tern. Dozens of phalaropes were taking off and landing everywhere we looked. I saw a non-breeding-plumaged Pigeon Guillemot briefly, but much to my frustration it disappeared underwater before anyone else got anything but a brief and unconvincing look at it.

This frustration only got worse when I spotted a Northern Fulmar, only to keep quiet in self-doubt (“maybe just a gull with weird light reflecting off the water onto the bill”) and have someone else call it a moment later. With the constant wind, engine noise, waves, and my throat dry no matter how hard I tried to stay hydrated, I wasn’t sure that I could effectively call a bird even if I had no mental blocks! It was all very well and good to tell myself I didn’t care what anyone thought of me, but I didn’t want to be one of those listers who goes on a trip and just looks at birds that other people point out!

Fretting, I retreated to the stern and continued to squint at storm-petrels. Gradually, the process of watching the sea settled my thoughts back off myself and onto the patterns made by the waves and the birds. We slipped between Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa Islands, and there a cry went up of “Common Murre!”

I had no qualms about who pointed that one out. I just ran forward and found myself with an excellent, extended look at yet another awesome alcid. We would see more Murres as the afternoon flowed on, but none as cooperative and close as this one.

S'up, Murre?

At San Miguel Island, the leaders decided to take us west, to test the tenor of the sea and decide whether we should spent the night at anchor or head out further. Unsheltered by the islands, things immediately grew choppier and only a few hardy souls rode the bow, let alone the upper deck.

In the stern, someone cried out “Albatross!” and everyone leaped up. Trapped behind tall people, I strained to see the bird before it crossed the horizon to no avail. My funk returned, as well you might imagine.

But not for long. One of those hardy souls on the upper deck spotted a whale spouting in the distance. It looked like a Humpback. We headed in the spout’s direction.

Soon there were more spouts. And then more. And over the next hour or so, we watched some twenty-five Humpbacks and five Blue Whales surrounding the boat, blowing, flipping their flukes, and going about their business with their remarkable grace. They were so close to the boat that we could hear the tonal difference in breathing between the species, so active that no one could hope to see everything, and so immense that I was suddenly struck by the almost comic smallness of our boat on the ocean. This was my first encounter with Humpbacks, as yesterday had been my first encounter with Blue Whales, but even the experienced whale-watchers on board said that it was one of the largest pods they’d ever seen. I found myself just turning in circles, trying to take it all in.

Whales!

Whales!

And More Whales!

Eventually the whales moved on, and we headed back for the shelter of the islands to anchor for the night. And as we did so, the albatross, or another very like it, returned. This time it stayed with the boat, and so I watched my life Black-footed Albatross until the earth rotated the sun out of sight, feeling entirely content.

And there were yet two more days to come. How could they hope to top this?

In keeping with pelagic post tradition, here is a picture of the Inimitable Todd's feet

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Bright and chipper at the crack of noon*, the Inimitable Todd and I lined up with the other twenty-odd birders and their multitudes of luggage, ready to board the Searcher. Was I excited? Just a little. This boat would be our home, our vehicle, our observation deck, our veritable Xanadu of Birding Bliss for the coming adventure.

And right now, it needed to have a pump replaced. So we hung out on shore for a bit, making small talk and getting to know each other. Then got on board, got a safety lecture, got our stuff stowed. Got out our binoculars and got ourselves positioned at the stern as the boat at last – at last! – began to make its way out of the harbor.

San Diego retreats, and the adventure begins

My first lifer came before we even reached open water; a floating platform (apparently the top of some kind of storage locker for bait) was virtually covered with Brandt’s Cormorants, along with a few Brown Pelicans and some California Sea Lions, not to mention Western Gulls and the truly fabulous Heerman’s Gulls.

Brandt's Cormorants and Brown Pelicans

Sea Lions, Heerman's Gulls, Even More Cormorants

Abundance would continue to be the theme of this first day (in notable contrast to my last pelagic experience). We were joined by the shearwaters not far out; mostly Sooties and Pink-footed (the latter another lifer) but including a handfull of Black-vented Shearwaters (another lifer.) Again in contrast to the lone Atlantic Sooty I saw last year, many of these birds elected to follow the boat for some distance and show off the wave-skimming skills that give the group its name. There were gulls as well, including a single Sabine (lifer).

Less than a mile out, we had our first jaeger. In fact, before the day was out we’d have multiple sightings of all three jaeger species – Pomarine, Parasitic, and Long-tailed (lifer, lifer, and lifer) – many far longer and closer than the desperate foggy glimpses that I’d been led to believe were typical looks. And then there was the moment when a loud cry of “Skua! Skua! Skua!” went up from the leaders around the boat, and a South Polar Skua** (a bit ratty in molt, but another lifer) came down directly across the bow and circled us long enough for all aboard to get an eyeful.

Less accommodating but even more exciting was the Craveri’s Murrelet that we spotted at the north end of the Nine-Mile Bank (apparently a standard stop for San Diego pelagics). It didn’t stick around long, but out of tribal affinity – or perhaps the desire for a taste of blog fame – it popped up directly underneath the bit of rail where I was standing before disappearing forever as only a softball-sized bird in a Pacific-sized ocean can do. Needless to say, lifer.

Various storm-petrels also abounded in this area; I added Black and Least to my life list but missed the Leach’s that some others spotted.

Such misses were inevitable; there was just plain too much to look at to hope to see everything. Besides the amazing birds already mentioned, many of which appeared in unusual numbers (we put up a raft of ten Long-tailed Jaegers at one point, for instance), there were more sea mammals to watch as well; Sei Whale, Bottlenose Dolphin, Long-beaked Common Dolphin, and Blue Whale. Blue Whales were one of those species, along with the California Condor and Whooping Crane, that I grew up expecting to go extinct long before I would ever have a chance to experience them firsthand; to be proved wrong on this was incredibly moving. The dolphins moved me too; that such intelligent animals, with so little reason to expect anything good from humans and boats, should nevertheless choose to interact with us in a way that seems so joyful…

Bow-riding Dolphins in Their Element

To cap it all the food was good, the company congenial, the weather pleasant, and the tummy untroubled by turbulence despite my lack of pill, patch, or other preparations. As I fitted myself into the confines of my bunk, I could not help but feel that things were going, as it were, swimmingly.

What would the next day hold? Stay tuned!

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*there are many nice things about a multi-day pelagic. One is that you don’t have to leave at the unmentionables of dawn to get out to where the birds are.

**I privately curse the humorless or perhaps teetotalling bird-namer who missed the opportunity to name this bird the Jaegermeister.

Soaring Yellow-nosed Albatross

I don’t think I’ll ever tire of seeing albatrosses, surely one of the most graceful and elegant birds that there is. Their mastery of flight is actually quite hard for me to comprehend, their heart rate while flying is only slightly higher than when resting, and it is even thought they can sleep while flying. This is a Yellow-nosed Albatross which are common off the coast of Perth; it is actually one of the smaller species of Albatross, with a wingspan of up to 2 metres. The Wandering Albatross and the Royal Albatross both grow to have wingspans of up to 3.5m.

I shot this image last Sunday on a pelagic seabird trip organised by Birds Australia, I had an absolute ball. The weather wasn’t too bad, a bit of rain, not too windy and quite a bit of cloud cover, which is handy when photographing black and white birds. I met some lovely people on board, including Simon Nevill, photographer and author. He has released many books such as Guide to the Wildlife of the Perth Region and Birds of the Greater South West, I can highly recommend these books as fantastic sources of knowledge. Simon is an absolute gentleman and his knowledge of Australian birds and the Australian environment is outstanding.

It has been a busy week as then on Wednesday night I did a presentation to the Ellenbrook Photography Group on Photoshop. It was a real honour for me to be able to share and hopefully I was able to help people learn. My Photoshop course preparation is coming along well and I will be starting my first course at the end of the month, it is going to run one night a week over two weeks. In order to facilitate learning and provide an intimate environment class sizes are limited to six people, the cost is $225.

Hope you are well and enjoying the stunning floral displays in bloom around at the moment.

Til next time,

Love Wes

EDIT: I should have mentioned that anyone who wants to contact me regarding information on the courses can contact me at wes.cooper@gmail.com. Apologies.

After a few days of rain Saturday dawned bright and sunny and, with westerly winds, we wouldn’t struggle to get the SarahJFK well offshore.  Reasonable sea passage over the previous days led to quiet confidence.  Lines of communication were in evidence to two seawatching sites with good birds already that morning; Whitburn (Sabine’s Gull) and Newbiggin (Cory’s Shearwater).  Our first Mackerel stop produced just one fish – hardly likely to attract hordes of hungry birds to the boat – and we headed north.  With strong winds this was a real pelagic experience.  Eventually we found birds…and Mackerel.  Manx Shearwaters were passing by during nearly all of the 8 hours we were out, and a few Sooty Shearwaters were seen as well,

Sooty Shearwater 05/09/09 (c)Ross Ahmed

single Arctic and Great Skuas gave excellent fly-by views

Arctic Skua 05/09/09 (c)Ross Ahmed

and we headed further offshore to check out a feeding flock of Kittiwakes.  As Allan slowed the boat and we began scanning the birds – whenever we happened to be on the crest of a wave – Tim Dean announced calmly “adult Sabine’s at the right hand end of the flock”.  There it was, our prize for persistence and the panaceae to the physical hardship of a pelagic on increasingly choppy water.  Tim and Ross Ahmed both managed to take a few record shots of the bird.  Many thanks to both of them for kindly supplying their images.

Sabine's Gull 05/09/09 (c) Ross Ahmed

The legendary Northern Experience Pelagic programme continues…

Saturday 5th September 2009 

An 8-hour pelagic departing Royal Quays Marina at 09:00.  Cost £45 per person.  Target species; skuas, shearwaters, cetaceans. One place remaining

Saturday 12th September 2009

Whale and Dolphin Cruise.  A 4-hour pelagic departing Seahouses Harbour at 10:00.  Cost £30/adult £20/child.  Target species; skuas, shearwaters, cetaceans

Saturday 19th September 2009

An 8-hour pelagic departing Royal Quays Marina at 09:00.  Cost £45 per person.  Target species; skuas, shearwaters, cetaceans. FULLY BOOKED

Saturday 21st November 2009

Tystie Trek.  A 2-hour pelagic departing Seahouses Harbour at 10:00.  Cost £30/person.  Target species; Grey Seal, Black Guillemot, seaduck

Saturday 5th December 2009

Seal and Seaduck Special.  A 4-hour pelagic departing Seahouses Harbour at 10:00.  Cost £40/person.  Target species; Grey Seal, Black Guillemot, seaduck

All of our trips are on boats which are fully licensed and insured to carry our clients.

Our pelagic trips from Royal Quays take place on the SarahJFK, a 44ft converted lifeboat which is used for sea-angling charters and for the last eight years has been chartered for our pelagic trips.  The boat offers an excellent vantage point for observation of wildlife.  All trips are limited to a maximum of 12 participants, allowing all on board a good opportunity to see any birds or cetaceans which are found.  Some truly outstanding opportunities for photography occur on our pelagic trips as well, with many birds being attracted very close to the boat.

Over recent years the pelagic trips have proved very successful and they are an excellent way to enjoy our offshore wildlife in the company of other birders who are always willing to help any less experienced participants.  More experienced birders may well find that the North Sea is a new frontier for their birding.  Pelagic birding is very unpredictable but highlights in recent years have included the 1st British North Sea Wilson’s Petrel (2002), Long-tailed Skua (2002), Sabine’s Gull (2005), Harbour Porpoise (2006), Minke Whale (2006 and 2007), Great Shearwater, Balearic Shearwater and Pomarine Skua (2007), excellent views of Sooty Shearwater in each of the last seven years and several very close encounters with White-beaked Dolphins.

Our Seahouses based pelagics are on one of the Glad Tidings fleet of boats, operated by Billy Shiel MBE.  The November and December trips offer an exclusive chance to search for wintering Black Guillemots and the seaduck that spend the winter months off the North Northumberland coast.

Participants should bring their own food and drink and warm/waterproof clothing.

To reserve a place on any of these trips, please contact Martin Kitching martin@newtltd.co.uk or (01670) 827465 and send a deposit of £10 per person per trip (cheque payable to ‘Northern Experience Wildlife Tours Ltd’, non-refundable if you cancel at a later date) to NEWT Ltd, 18 Frances Ville, Scotland Gate, Northumberland, NE62 5ST.  The balance of payment is due 2 weeks before sailing.

The final Northern Experience evening pelagic of the year saw the best weather of the last three Fridays.  Demand for places was so high that we chartered a second boat, and collected nearly a full boat-load from Mill Dam, South Shields.  The plan was to take the two boats out in tandem; the ramifications of one boat seeing something good, and the other boat being out of sight, just weren’t worth contemplating.

Much like last week, Manx Shearwaters were much in evidence; presenting photo and video opportunities throughout most of the four hours that we were at sea.  We must have seen well over 100, not surprising when 250 were recorded passing Newbiggin yesterday evening.  Waders were in evidence; a Turnstone and a Sanderling flew side-by-side, heading south, and a fast-moving line of ‘curlews’ low over the sea were thought by one person on the SarahJFK to be Whimbrel.  Video footage taken at the time suggests that the minority view was the correct one.  A distant ‘V’ of birds above the horizon proved to be Curlew.  Fulmars, Kittiwakes, Gannets, gulls, gulls and more gulls all stayed close to the boats throughout the evening.  A lone Arctic Skua was pestering a group of terns, but there was no sign of the Bonxies reported by fishing boats earlier in the day.  A Moon Jellyfish passed along the length of the boat before dropping out of sight beneath the hull and the Fulmars were squabbling amongst themselves, almost close enough to touch.

As the sun began to set over the Cheviots, an orange moonrise was away to the east and coats were donned as the temperature began to fall.  As the atmospheric ‘at-sea’ experience gave way to the reality of sailing back along the Tyne, our total species count was announced as 22.  And then myself, Ipin, Janet, Joanne and Sarah headed into Tynemouth and the Gate of India; a sociable end to a typically sociable evening pelagic.

With a love of seawatching, pelagic trips have played a big part in my life each summer for the last 10 years.  The second of this year’s Northern Experience/NTBC pelagics was yesterday evening and it proved to be a good one.  Initially there were very few birds to be seen, but then we started to find Manx Shearwaters, not just the ones and twos that we expect on a North Sea pelagic, but several groups in double figures, including 22 together.  At least 60 were seen in total.  As they passed by the barrage of long lenses on board, it sounded like a 1970’s typing pool.  Guillemot, Razorbill and Puffin were all seen and there were good numbers of Fulmar, Kittiwake and a whole plethora of gulls, including a very dark juvenile Lesser Black-backed Gull that kept impersonating something more interesting every time it rejoined the feeding frenzy around the SarahJFK.  A few Gannets were seen, although not as many as last week, and still no skuas.  Last year, and this, has seen a worrying trend developing; if we go back before then, we could almost guarantee Great Skua on our evening trips, now we’ve had five evening pelagics in two years with no skuas at all.

A couple of jellyfish attracted interest but quickly disappeared under the boat before we could get a good look at them.  One looked like a Blue Jellyfish and the other probably a Barrel Jellyfish.

Looking forward to next Friday…

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With a full boat of anxious anglers we departed @ 8pm and headed offshore on a 14hr night trip. We steamed a few minuets over 3 hrs to 145 ft of water. The ride out was nice with flat calm seas and the first drop rewarded us with lots of variety, like Gag grouper, lane, mangrove, vermillion, yellowtail snapper, red porgies, key west grunts and a few bar jacks. We also released loads of undersized red grouper and many sharks. Just after 1am the wind came on out of the southeast and changed the whole game for us. The boat swung with the wind moving us off the spot so we picked up anchor and started toward the next spot only about ¾ miles away. It was lock and load fishing, Red snapper after red snapper coming over the rail WOW right!!! Wrong the National Marine Fisheries service and other assorted lobbyist groups have proceeded to shorten the season year after year by saying these fish are being over fished. Anyway the crew and I were very busy venting and releasing the red snapper with care. We stayed there for about 15 minuets waiting for the grouper to start, but the anglers could not get bait past the red snapper so we decide to move on. Just as I blurted lines up, an angler on the bow nailed a fat gag grouper. With the weather getting worse I wanted to hit as many spots as we could before it got too bad so we hauled anchor and went off. The next few spots gave us assorted snapper and porgy action and plenty of sharks. By 6:30am the seas we pretty nasty and it was definitely time to get home. The ride home was not like the ride out it was much bumpier and much longer.

Overall we put a decent catch together and had loads of action. I do believe if the weather had cooperated with us a few more hrs we would have had a slammer trip. The Red snapper season opens June 1st 2009 I can’t wait!!!!

Capt Rich

Pensieri… immagini… volti… pixel… archi trionfali… scoscese tane… membra accatastate… emozioni che forse erano.

Sospensione… attesa… elettricità… pulsare scomposto di membra… oscuro orizzonte… lievi cigolii… possente uragano.

Rabbia crescente.

Caos e archetipi.

Adrenalinica attesa di nulla.

Percezione incessante di un nulla che viene.

Vertigine.

Urlo alla sabbia e alle onde,

calpesto l’aria…

assaporo il vento…

crollo.

Ghigno inatteso,

rabbia che scivola,

cronotopi danzanti,

tumulto interiore…

Aria

Check out the new fishing gear from Fishworks Proven Products. These are some of the best fishing clothes I have seen in the marine industry. The whole Fishworks product line is based on quality down to every last detail. The new fish works camo shorts are some of the coolest we have seen here at Fishing for redfish. Fishworks has long been known as the innovators of strong, well researched and tested fishing gear. Do yourself a favor don’t buy fishing cloths just because they have a cool name on it, buy them based on quality and function!

Below are some Fishworks new 2009 products.

Camo Fishproduct shorts

Fishworks Vallerta New Shorts

Fishworks just released some new 2009 fish clothing. Fishworks claim to fame is quality in every little fishing detail. Many anglers say you just can’t wear out a pair of Fishworks shorts or pants. Check them out for yourselves.

click for fishworks clothing

On the 4th of October, 2008 I went on my first pelagic trip. The trip was run especially for Ruth Miller & Alan Davies who are attempting to see more bird species in a year than anyone else. their adventure is called The Biggest Twitch. The pelagic was organized by Zest For Birds a non-profit group that runs these trips regularly out of Cape Town, South Africa.

After an early start we left the harbour on board the Zest II, a converted Navy tender. The harbour brought the usual gulls, cormorants, terns & gannets, as well as a number of Southern Right Whales (Eubalaena australis).

Once clear of the harbour we spotted the first of the pelagic species (and my first lifer of the day) – a White-chinned Petrel (Procellaria aquinoctialis). These were one of the commonest species encountered on the trip.

White-chinned Petrel (Procellaria aquinoctialis)

Also spotted on the way out were Shy Albatross (Thalassarche cauta), Sooty Shearwater (Puffinus griseus), Great Shearwater (Puffinus gravis), Northern Giant Petrel (Macronectes halli), and Pintado Petrel.

Great Shearwater Puffinus gravis

Immature Shy Albatross (Thalassarche cauta)

A number of trawlers were visible on the horizon & we headed towards one. The crowd of birds in its wake was unbelievable!

Cloud of seabirds feeding in the wake of a trawler. That’s Table Mountain and Cape Point in the background.

Our species total rapidly increased: Atlantic Yellow-nosed Albatross (Thalassarche chlororhynchos), Black-browed Albatross (Thalassarche melanophris), two species of timy storm-petrel: Wilson’s  (Oceanites oceanus) and the less-common Black-bellied (Fregetta tropica) which looked like butterflies as they fluttered between the waves.

Black-browed Albatross (Thalassarche melanophris)

The species list continued to increase as we followed the trawler’s wake: Sub-antarctic Skua (Catharacta antarctica) and Indian Yellow-nosed Albatross (Thalassarche carteri). Suddenly a cry went up “White back!” (Only 4 Albatross in the region have white backs.) It was a young Wandering Albatross (Diomedea exulans), the largest of all albatrosses having the largest wingspan of any living bird. Though not fully grown it was an amazing sight and definitely a highlight of the trip.

Wandering Albatross (Diomedea exulans)

The final new bird seen in the feeding frenzy was a single Southern Giant-petrel (Macronectes giganteus) which differs from the Northern Giant-petrel in the green tip to its bill. (The Northern has a reddish-brown tip.)

Feeding seabirds in the wake of a trawler.

Heading back to Cape Town we added one more pelagic species to our lists as fleeting glimses were had of 2 Soft-plumaged Petrels (Pterodroma mollis).

An absolutely fantastic experience that every birder should undertake at least once in their life. I added 16 new species to my life list and had an amazing time.

I’m going retro with this blog until I get caught up a bit. I promise I won’t go back to my childhood.

On August 10 I went out with Monterey Seabirds to Monterey Bay. It was another foggy day, but that’s what we get this time of year. The seas weren’t flat, but they weren’t bad. You need a bit of wind if you want tubenoses to be flying anyhow.

At one point we had lost sight of land and were cruising about 8 knots and had thousands of Sooty Shearwaters and hundreds of other birds cruising along with us. We also had hundreds of Pacific White-sided and Northern Right Whale Dolphins and a couple of Humpback Whales doing the same, but they were mostly in the water.

I commented to Jeff how cool it was and he said, “Yeah, it’s liking being back in the Eocene.” There was barely any indication of human presence, aside from our diesel-fume-spewing boat, and these animals have been doing this for thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of years. It was easy to just be present and enjoy the spectacle of life around us.

I’ve been out on Monterey Bay for almost ten years and have yet to get a good photo of a Northern Right Whale Dolphin. Today they were “porpoising” a lot and close to the boat, but it’s really hard to anticipate when one will come out of the water, and by the time I see one and get the camera in position, it’s too late. So I tried a new technique of just holding the viewfinder to my eye, focused on the water, finger on the shutter button and waiting. Eventually a dolphin came into view and I jammed the button down. Here’s what I got:

Northern Right Whale Dolphin

This is my first blog post ever. I’m not convinced the world needs yet another person trying to be heard on the Web, but I do want to share my experiences and photos with others, and some seem to appreciate it, and this is the easiest way.

I went on my fifth pelagic of the year on Saturday with Monterey Seabirds. It was a very dark and gloomy day, but the seas were greasy calm and it wasn’t too cold. This is a great time of year to be out and it was birdy (and mammaly) all day. We headed north towards Santa Cruz county since the SCZ bird club was on board and that’s where the storm-petrel flocks have been lately.

I photographed this Buller’s Shearwater early, and it was so dark due to heavy, gray skies that I had the ISO cranked to 3200. Very noisy, but a decent image.

Buller's Shearwater

I think it was Todd, but someone saw a Manx Shearwater near the back of the boat. This is not a common bird in California waters, but it’s pretty regular these days. This guy is in serious need of a molt.

Manx Shearwater

Manx Shearwater

We also had a Flesh-footed Shearwater, which is uncommon, but regular these days.This guy had something wrong with one of his primaries and was probably missing at least one as well.

Flesh-footed Shearwater

At one point we came across a huge group of hundreds of Pacific White-sided Dolphins and a few Northern Right-Whale Dolphins. This youngster wanted to show off.

Pacific White-sided Dolphin

We finally found the storm-petrel flock, but they never came in close enough for a good photograph. Of course the light had really improved by this time. We were so far north we didn’t get back to Monterey until after 4. It was a great day. Here are some more images from the day.

Black-footed Albatross

Pink-footed Shearwater

Sooty Shearwater

South Polar Skua