Greetings everyone,


Yesterday Westport Seabirds had a great trip offshore. We ran one of our outer slope trips were we
specifically target Leach?s Storm-Petrel.
The weather started off very wet.
Rainy and misty for about the first 3 hours (at least for me on the bow,
the back of the boat was relatively dry)!
The weather eventually cleared up around 9:30 and we were left with a
beautiful overcast day with excellent sea conditions and visibility.


Heading out, we encountered a very large flock of Sooty
Shearwaters at the mouth of the harbor.
>From the bow I was able to spot a Manx Shearwater take off the water and
fly into the mass of swirling birds leading to a ?Where?s Waldo?
situation. Unfortunately we could not
relocate the Manx.

We ended up finding a small fleet of Shrimp Boats (4) about
18 miles offshore. These boats had a
plethora of birds behind them including most of the usual suspects ? Sooty,
Pink-footed Shearwaters, Northern Fulmar, Black-footed Albatross and
Fork-tailed Storm-Petrels.


Near the boats we had our first cetaceans ? 2 Humpback
Whales that were observed well by all.


We headed farther offshore towards 125 degrees west
longitude ? the shelf edge. We observed
our first Cassin?s Auklets of the trip at this point including a couple that
were relatively cooperative (as cooperative as Cassin?s get). Once we reached the shelf edge we found our
first Leach?s Storm-Petrels and put down a chum slick. We were able to attract a lot of Fork-tailed
Storm-Petrels to the slick. A few Leach?s
did come in as well to give everyone good looks and comparisons. We left the chum when we observed some
splashing and breaching of marine mammals about ? mile to the west. We quickly raced over to see what they were
and found a pod of ~30 Risso?s Dolphins (Gray Grampus). I personally have never seen Risso?s jump all
the way out of the water so that was one of my several highlights of the
day! Not to be outdone, a short time
later we encountered a pod of ~12 Orca, possibly of the Offshore ?shark-eating?
variety. There were at least 3 big bull
males, an immature male, a very young calf and several females in the pod. They let us observe them for quite a while
which sometimes Orca offshore do not allow.


We worked our way back inshore to find the shrimp boats
again. We started chumming once we found
the boats and the birds and had quite the spectacle of Sooty Shearwaters and
Pink-footed Shearwaters coming right up behind the boat in such a feeding
frenzy that most of us haven?t seen very often on a Westport trip. Later on we encountered a pair of Scripp?s
(Xantus?s) Murrelets. We all got really
nice looks at these birds, which is newly split from Xantus?s Murrelet, now two
species, Scripp?s and Guadalupe.


Other highlights were 1 Arctic Tern, 2 South Polar Skuas, 1
Sabine?s Gull, 4 Northern Fur Seals, 1 Elephant Seal, 1 Salmon Shark, 4 Blue
Sharks, 1 Harbor Porpoise and 6 Steller?s Sea-Lions near shore.


A great day offshore ? Leaders were Scott Mills, Ryan Shaw,
and Michael Donahue.


For Westport
Seabirds -

Ryan Shaw

Tacomartshaw80 at hotmail.com

eBird Checklists can be found here:

http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist?subID=S11078764
- Offshore

http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist?subID=S11078821
? Dock to 3 miles out

http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist?subID=S11078883
? 3 Miles out to Dock


Numbers are also on our website at:

www.westportseabirds.com