This afternoon while working as a naturalist on the Western Explorer, a
whale and wildlife tour boat, I was surprised to see several hundred
sooty shearwaters off the southwest coast of San Juan Island (from
approximately 2-4 miles offshore). I have never seen sooty shearwaters
in the San Juans in my five years of working on the water.

At first I just saw small groups of them flying here and there, but we
went over to check out a huge bait ball congregation of several thousand
birds and there were hundreds of the shearwaters taking part in the
feeding frenzy. Most of them were sooty shearwaters, but there were a
couple of another species, possibly pink-footed shearwaters? See the
link below for a photo to help with the ID.

Also participating in the bait ball were common murres, pelagic
cormorants, rhinoceros auklets, glaucous-winged gulls, California gulls,
Heermann's gulls, and probably at least a few other gull species.

You can see some photos of the shearwaters and the bait ball feeding
frenzy (as well as the orcas and Steller sea lions we saw) on my blog here:
http://orcawatcher.blogspot.com/2009/09/improbability-of-shearwaters.html

It will be interesting to see how long these shearwaters hang out....
Monika Wieland