Westport Seabirds Pelagic Today

Posted on by Ed

Ken and I headed for the coast yesterday and after traffic and detour delays arrived at the Hoquiam Sewer Ponds about 5:45 PM There we sorted through a moderate number of peeps without finding a Baird’s sandpiper but did find 3 adult Pectoral sandpipers. This was a FOY WA bird for me.

From there we dashed to Westport to check into our room when we promised the hotel we’d check in. After checking in we dashed back to Bottle Beach hoping for the Willets and the Ruddy Turnstone that had been seen there recently. No luck on those birds, but there were lots of peeps, SBDO, and BBPL to look through. I managed a FOY Brown Pelican for WA.
Back at the hotel we got a quick night’s sleep and were up in time to be on the Monte Carlo for the Westport Seabirds deep water pelagic trip.
The day was perfect for a WA pelagic trip, high overcast skies, no fog, only about 3-4 foot seas and little to no wind waves. We crossed the Westport bar on an outgoing tide and headed for Gray’s canyon. The day was lacking in real uncommon birds, but we did manage most of the expected regular early August pelagic species. This being my first pelagic trip of 2017 I got a good number of FOY WA birds including Sooty shearwater, Pink-footed shearwater, N. fulmar, Parasitic and Pomerine jaeger, South Polar Skua, Leach’s storm petrel, and Heermann’s gull.

One of many Fork-tailed storm petrel

One of our first tubenose was this South Polar Skua seeming to use the Pacific as its own birdbath.


It seemed that most of the Black-footed albatross were near fishing vessels

We had many color variations of Northern Fulmar

Near the end of the trip a Pomerine jaeger chased a Parasitic jaeger off a California gull.

We got back in by 3;30 PM, made another quick stop at Bottle Beach seeing about the same species as last evening, and got home uneventfully. This trip puts me over 300 species in WA in 2017, my first time over 300 in a year, and 5 months to go!