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NOTE: on Sept 26th Mona Cavallero shared this video of our 9/8 trip.... Thank you Mona (and Mike for creating this video)!
This is the trip report for the HAS Sept 8, 2013 boat trip in the waters off the east side ("back side") of Cape Cod. This HAS birding trip piggy-backed on the always-enjoyable NECWA whales and seabirds trip that day.
Everybody agreed this was a very good and very interesting trip.
The HAS trip invitations resulted in 21 additional people on-board, including 4 Boston University marine biology students. Thank you all for joining this trip, where our participation was planned eleven months ago with Krill Carson and us. And best wishes to co-leaders Keith Mueller and Guy Tudor who were not able to make this trip at the last minute for health reasons.
This ten-hour trip (10am-8pm, with perfectly comfortable air temp of mostly 75F) consisted of three very different parts:
PART 1: 4 hour transit to our target area, and we saw almost no birds during this transit. The total lack of birds was amazingly different from the normal activity birders expect in these waters in early September. Blair Nikula said he remembers a few years in the 1980s when this wide area off Race Point may have been similarly devoid of seabirds, but nothing remotely like this in the last few decades. What is going on here? Has the marine ecosystem here changed? How? Why?
PART 2: 2 hours in our target area (20 miles east of Chatham MA) where we chummed and dripped a trail of menhaden oil, resulting in many gulls following our wake, followed by multiple shearwaters (1 Sooty, 20-30 Great, several Manx), plus great views of whales and dolphins.
PART 3: 4 hour return transit which became rougher and rougher as the winds and waves increased. This was one heck of an exciting/thrilling and sometimes bumpy ride home after a 3pm cold front passed through and kicked up the winds and waves (5-10ft). The captain was great and got us home to a beautiful sunset and moon over the Plymouth harbor.
Carol "Krill" Carson and the entire NECWA team were great!
Wayne Petersen provided a huge amount of bird information (and more general nature info) over the easily-heard public-address system, for hours! Very helpful, including his very honest discussion about the stunning lack of birds in Part1 of the trip, and some of the possible marine ecosystem causes and chain reactions.
Everybody on-board got a good balanced focus on birds, whales, dolphins, and overall marine ecology... thank you Krill, Wayne, Blair, Jim, John and Peter and the whole crew! Thanks for the win-win approach, for both birders and non-birders. Thanks also to NOAA's Anne-Marie Runfola for her support. And thanks Blair for your constructive suggestions for this trip.
Notice that this trip barely touched the southern edge of Stellwagen Bank.... Most of our birds, whales and dolphins were in the area 20 miles east of Chatham MA (the far right side of the red route line, where the squiggles reflect the boat searching around for the best spots for whales and birds, and also the location where we dispersed a continual drip of menhaden oil, with good results)....
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| Route of 2013 09 08 ten-hour trip (10am to 8pm) from Plymouth MA. The trip did not really end where the map shows the red END marker, instead my iPhone battery died. Note that most of the activity was in the lower right (SE) corner of the route, 20 miles east of Chatham, where we hung out for two hours, put out chum and menhaden oil, and got whales, dolphins and 3 species of shearwaters. |
Here is list of birds seen 9/8.....
Manx Shearwater, 3
Sooty Shearwater, 1
Great Shearwater, 20 or more
Leach's Storm-petrel, 1
Jaeger spp, 2
Common Tern, 30
Forster's Tern, 1 ("had great looks of one Forster's Tern in a group of three. Silvery white wings and isolated eye patch")
Northern Gannet, 20 or more
Phalarope spp, 3+8=11
Phalarope, Red-necked, 2
Black-bellied Plover, 20 in a flock of 200 smaller shorebirds
Common Loon, 2
Laughing Gull, 10
Herring Gull, 100 or more
Gr. Black-backed Gull, 50
Mourning Dove, 1 (20 miles east of Chatham).
Sabine's Gull, zero, and none reported along the US East Coast since 8/26, although on the same day as our trip 9/8 there were 9 SAGU just northwest of Maine, and 4 more in Ontario near Buffalo NY. Where are those gulls heading next??
Most of the birds we saw on 9/8 were in the area 20miles east of Chatham MA, and most seemed to arrive in response to chumming a continual slow drip of a gallon of menhaden fish oil. Birds responded to this oil within minutes (first gulls, then shearwaters ten minutes later) and built up over half an hour. Almost no birds anywhere else!
Krill provided the following list of non-birds seen....
4 humpback whales (Two pairs: Nine and calf, Lava and unknowns)
4 - 5 minke whales
10 - 12 Atlantic white-sided dolphins
50 - 60 common dolphins
1 harbor seal
1 ocean sunfish
1 shark, in the menhaden fish oil slick
Here are links to the NECWA blog and website....
NECWA News Blog
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PART 1: Heading SE toward Chatham waters, as the cold front's clouds move in and pass over...
Blair standing in the back, pondering the low numbers of seabirds in the area. |
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| Cold front approaching at noon on Sept 8th, and passing through during PART 2 of this trip. |
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| PART 2: Wayne Petersen (on right), extraordinary Nature leader, expert, scientist and commentator, watching dolphins and shearwaters as the cold front blows through and clears the sky, about 20 miles east of Chatham MA. |
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| A gallon of the-good-stuff, menhaden fish oil (with a pin hole in the jug) floating in the water, doing a slow-drip alongside the boat, which immediately left an aromatic visible slick and brought in gulls within two minutes, and then 3 species of shearwaters ten minutes later. |
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| Hump-backed Whale breaching, 20 miles east of Chatham, MA. Photo thanks to Maggie Peretto. |
Comparing the last three years of this HAS seabirding trip:
In 2011 and 2012 we were able to find seabird concentrations in the areas around Race Point, MA, including large numbers of common terns and 30-50 jaegers. In 2013 this was NOT true, and we had to travel several hours to find a patch of activity 20 miles off the beaches of Chatham MA, and even that patch required menhaden fish oil to attract the gulls and eventually shearwaters. Why is the RacePoint/StellwagenBank area so quiet in the last two months?
Notice the very reduced numbers of terns and jaegers in 2013...
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| Comparing recent HAS seabirding trips to the Cape Cod MA area. Click on this image to enlarge, and then press ESC key to return here. |
Living things need to invest their time near their food supply. Notice the shearwater track below, where this one particular tagged Great Shearwater (named "Provincetown") passed through the StellwagenBank/RacePoint area but then quickly moved on to other areas, further offshore, which undoubtedly had more prey items for it. The concentrated clusters of small circles (the bird's location) suggest the locations of concentrations of the food which this shearwater needs, and also probably the best places for birders to find patches of activity with many seabirds... note that these concentrations are all pretty far offshore, unfortunately for birders who want to get there....
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| This is the 2013 track of one Great Shearwater named "Provincetown". Notice how little time it spent near RacePoint/StellwagenBank or any land. Most of its time, like other tracked Great Shearwaters, was in the waters SE of CapeCod and 100miles east of Cape Cod. For details see this NOAA site... 2013 Shearwater Tagging: National Marine Sanctuaries Thanks to Dave Wiley (NOAA) for permission to display this image. |
As you know, each year this HAS seabirding trip is a (different) experiment. Please email me with suggestions, criticisms, and lessons learned. What would you want changed if we run this trip again next year or the year after? Robben99@gmail.com
Remember that we have no idea if the seabirds will bounce back in these waters next year!
An unusual news item...
Seabird hunters may be a risk to ornithologists in Malta! Scientists studying Scopoli's (formerly a subspecies of Cory's) Shearwaters in Malta had their car shot at on Sept 11th. Fortunately nobody was hurt...
BirdLife – Seabird researchers ‘target of violent intimidation’ by hunters in Gozo - maltatoday.com.mt
Agreement on the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels - Cory's and Scopoli's Shearwaters are now considered to be separate species
LESSONS LEARNED/CONFIRMED: draft evolving...
The longer trip (at least 8 hours) may be required to get to the best patches for seabirds (& whales).
Chumming with menhaden fish oil worked extremely well to attract seabirds within minutes, and we should start laying-down that slick earlier in the trip.
Remember to bring water thermometer next time.
Remember to bring GPS track logger.
Suggest that whale-watchers bring binoculars also.
Find a way to improve communications between pulpit and second deck.
No one observer saw all the seabirds. The more observers, the more birds will be seen.
