The Cape Cod Birding Festival concluded with a pelagic trip on Sept 15, 2013. The trip was extremely pleasant, the leaders were great (including B.Nikula, P.Trull, P.Flood), and the seabirds, well, they were in low numbers, as they have been for months in these areas, and similar to the numbers on the 9/8 trip last Sunday out of Plymouth (scroll down to the page/post below here). The variety of standard species seen was not bad, but the numbers of each species was unusually low. Hopefully this is cyclical and these numbers will bounce back.
Blair's chumming of popcorn soaked in fish oil was effective in attracting multiple shearwaters.
By the way, there was one Sabine's Gull on North Beach the day before our 9/15 pelagic trip, and one a day after, three miles down Nauset (Orleans) Outer Beach, sitting on flats behind the beach. These beaches are only several miles from the route of our boat on Sunday. And perhaps that bird was flying around on Sunday within a mile of our boat, who knows. So near and yet so far!!
Part of the reason I mention this is that when we were within about half an hour of returning to port I was in a conversation while intermittently watching a low flock of a dozen common terns vanishing off into the distance, as we left them half a mile behind in our wake, when suddenly a very different gull/tern popped up near them, flashed a striking white and black wing pattern several times, and then immediately disappeared, perhaps settling back down on the water. I wanted to say "Sabine's Gull" but held my tongue (especially after last September's weird SAGU-wannabe laughing gull off P'town) until we could go back and get a closer & longer look at this distant bird (and get a lot more people to see it). We turned the boat around and went part of the way back to that general area, but no unusual bird was to be seen again (needless to say, I was very disappointed, as were others). The terns had already largely dispersed or flown farther away, and if there was a SAGU swimming somewhere within that square mile of waves, it just stayed on the water swimming. We scanned the wide area intently but could not find that bird.
Could this have been the SAGU seen on nearby North Beach and Nauset Outer Beaches one day before and one day after our pelagic trip? Maybe, but for me it just became another one of those briefly seen distant birds that "got-away." As my aging eyesight gets worse, I have gotten in the habit of carefully double and triple checking every bird before I identify it, and I will not count this bird on my own trip list for the day. Sabine's Gull is not a lifer for me (having seen many on the west coast and a few on the east coast), but in the last few years it is becoming my favorite phantom-bird that keeps on eluding me... and surprisingly, I am ok with that! It keeps the game interesting.
There were almost zero tuna fishing boats visible anywhere on our trip. This suggests few tuna are in these waters, which suggests few medium fish and few smaller fish in these waters. Hence fewer seabirds. We need to find the fish, which are probably further east or southwest toward Montauk. I'm going to take a break for a while (after several more seabird censuses I signed up for), and hope these waters pick-up this winter or next Spring.
The weather was beautiful, mostly cloudless, and very calm, with air temp around 65F-70F. SST (sea surface temp) ranged from 59F a mile outside Hyannis harbor, down to 57F at our first slick/stop, back up to 60F approaching Monomoy Point.
See Blair Nikula's report, copied below from MassBirds, along with maps below for our September 15th 8-hour 115-mile counterclockwise route....
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| Ignore the blue Elevation data which is not accurate. The orange Speed data, however, is accurate, reflecting areas where we stopped and motored around slowly looking at birds. |
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| Spectacular weather NE of Nantucket on Sept 15, 2013. |
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Subject: CCBC pelagic trip - 9/15
Date: Sun Sep 15 2013 20:06 pm
From: odenews AT odenews.org
The Cape Cod Birding Festival concluded today with a pelagic trip that
left Hyannis Harbor at 6:00 this morning, returning about 2:30 this
afternoon. It was a delightful day offshore, but once again seabirds
were very scarce, though with about 70 pairs of eyes aboard we managed
to find representatives of most of the expected species at this season.
Misses included Cory's Shearwater, Wilson's Storm-Petrel, and Pomarine
Jaeger, though these were offset somewhat by a variety of non-marine
migrants, most notably both Black-Crowned Night-Heron and Northern
Harrier 15+ miles offshore.
Upon leaving Nantucket Sound, we headed ESE, skirting the northern edge
of Nantucket Shoals, to a point almost 20 miles east of Nantucket. A
couple of chumming sessions using a mixture of chopped suet and popcorn
soaked in Menhaden Oil in this general area attracted a modest number of
gulls and an occasional shearwater, but little else. We then worked our
way NNE to a point about 20 miles east of Chatham, seeing rather little
along the way, before turning inshore. About 8-10 miles SE of Chatham
we encountered a flurry of activity, highlighted by several jaegers. We
then headed SW to Monomoy Point where we cruised along the beach
checking the many gulls and assorted other birds, before heading back
across Nantucket Sound to the dock.
We didn't do a very good job keeping track of numbers, but rough
estimates are:
Offshore:
2 Common Loons
2 Am. Black Ducks
1 Green-winged Teal (flying offshore with the black ducks)
6 Great Shearwaters
12 Sooty Shearwaters
1 Manx Shearwater
6 N. Gannets
1 Leach's Storm-Petrel (probably the best seabird of the day; well offshore)
400 Laughing Gulls (about 95% juveniles, which is curiously typical
offshore at this time of the year)
10 Red-Necked Phalaropes (a single plus a flock of 9, all sitting on the water and affording excellent close views). 200 Herring Gulls 2 Lesser Black-backed Gulls (adults or near adults) 150 Great Black-backed Gulls 4 Roseate Terns 75 Common Terns 1 Long-tailed Jaeger (juvenile; seen well, initially on the water, then in flight; many photos) 2 Parasitic Jaegers 4 jaeger sp. (distant) 1 Cape May Warbler 1 Magnolia Warbler 1-2 warbler sp. Non-avian wildlife: 2+ Minke Whales 1 Basking Shark (superb views alongside the boat) 2 Ocean Sunfish (one alongside the boat) 3 bats (one over Nantucket Sound, 2 offshore; presumably migrant Red Bats, but I'm not sure whether any were positively identified) 1 Cloudless Sulphur (butterfly) 1 Common Green Darner (dragonfly) 1-2 unidentified dragonflies Nantucket Sound and on and around Monomoy Point: 2 Common Eider 1 Red-breasted Merganser 2 Great Cormorants 40 Double-crested Cormorants 3 Am. Oystercatchers 50 Laughing Gulls 800 Herring Gulls 2 Lesser Black-backed Gulls (adult-type on Monomoy) 800 Great Black-backed Gulls 1 Black Tern 75 Common Terns 1 Forster's Tern 1 N. Harrier 1,000's of Tree Swallows (swarming over South Monomoy) Blair Nikula -- 2 Gilbert Lane Harwich Port, MA 02646 http://www.odenews.org/ http://www.capecodbirds.org/- See more at: http://birding.aba.org/message.php?mesid=514459&MLID=MASS&MLNM=Massachusetts#sthash.9UP5CFfa.dpuf
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