Today's Seawatch excitement came in the form of a plover that, at this writing, is still yet to be positively identified. It dropped in and landed on the beach just below where we count from, and hunkered there, seemingly exhausted, for roughly the next hour. More details on this bird can be found within the 0700 checklist contained in this report, but in short, it didn't seem quite right for a Snowy Plover. The possibility of Kentish Plover (an old-world species which Snowy Plover was lumped with until 2011) was raised, which created quite a bit of excitement in the local birding community, but despite the notes and photos that were obtained, I'm not sure this is a bird that can be confidently identified. And--even though Snowy Plovers are a regularly occurring species not far from the Seawatch--they don't turn up at Pt. Pinos often at all. Per eBird, there are just a handful of site records. So regardless of identification, it was an unexpected bird that added a fair amount of excitement to our morning.
We did have another nice loon flight today, with 1219 Red-throated (sunrise hour peak, 405) and 6114 Pacifics (0700 hour peak, 3185). The flight was high, with some flocks cutting the bay behind the buoy but no heavy loon traffic on the far outer bay-cutting line.
The morning murre flight was busy, too, with 550 coming by in the 0700 hour. Our day's cumulative tally was 1553, and we also had 3 Ancient Murrelets.
The Surf Scoter flight was pretty quiet--just 205.
The wind today was light south until around 0900, when it switched to NNW and built to 15 knots NW by count's end. With those winds, I would have expected a little more tubenose diversity during the afternoon, but alas, aside from plenty of Northern Fulmars (200), we had just 2 Short-tailed Shearwaters on the tubenose front.
See the full checklist here: https://ebird.org/checklist/S203089600
- Alison Vilag
Comments