A naturalist at an early age, I thought I'd seen some big bird flocks before, and I had: as a young teenager I had seen Snow Geese in the tens of thousands up on Skagit flats. Wow. That didn't prepare me for the sheer numbers of birds I was to see a few years later.
The date was September 7 1974, and I was on my first (and only to date) Westport Pelagic trip. We did the offshore thing, and I saw a number of lifer birds and other creatures. My favorite was the Mola mola, which is a huge pelagic fish that we saw a few of lollygagging on the surface. Like many largish sea creatures ( baleen whales, whale (and basking) sharks, the Mola mola apparently attains it's massive proportions by the mass consumption of smaller ,seemingly inconsequential sea life- the Mola mola likes to eat lots of jellyfish,for example. Must be a real lot, based on how big they get.
The day before the Pelagic trip, my bird pal Curtis and I had watched thousands and thousands of Sooty Shearwaters streaming by low (shearing the waves) from the Westport jetty. That was incredible, yet the big spectacle was to come the next evening.
As the pelagic boat pulled into Grays Harbor right at sunset, the sky was darkened by thousands of Sooty Shearwaters swarming in a big cloud all around us , even underneath us, as many overloaded, or surprised shearwaters dove below as the boat plowed through. To say "the sky was darkened" by this flock may sound like hyperbole, but it truly was. A jaw-dropping experience.
Last fall Devorah (the Ornithologist) Bennu posted a computer mock-up of what a giant flock of Passenger Pigeons might have looked like. Well ,the closest I've ever came to seeing something like that was those Sooty's in Grays Harbor.

Now, I don't know about the "gazillion" Blair Bernson recently claimed seeing, because I looked it up and it turns out that "gaziilion" is not a real number - it's a term used to describe a number of something too overwhelming to count - but I kinda knew what he was talking about. The pelagic trip had a number of experienced watchers, including Terry Wahl (if I remember correctly - I wasn't keeping a journal at the time) and somebody came up with the fabulous estimate of a quarter (or was it half) million birds.
Well, I was too overwhelmed to count at the time, but still have a picture in my head of that scene all these years later. Awesome.
Jeff Gibson,Memory Lane, Wa