Nov 27 - Thanksgiving

Weather: This is the third consecutive day that, upon going to bed, I've expected light winds in the morning and woken to brisk northeast winds, ugh! Fortunately they were lighter than the prior two days and died off by late morning. It was partly cloudy with minimal swell and good visibility at the Seawatch today. At the outer buoy, it was blowing 15.5 knots from the NE at dawn. It switched to NNW at 1200 (dropping to ~10 knots). At dawn pressure, was 30.13, it dropped to 30.08 at sunset.

Birds: Any day you see an albatross is a good day, so today was a good day. The albatross, a Black-footed, was arcing around for 10 minutes or so well to the SW of Pt. Pinos. It was distant, but not so distant that we couldn't appreciate all the things that make an albatross an albatross, and it was a much-anticipated and much-deserved lifer for Madison!

Despite the northeast winds, we had the best Loon Hour we've had in several days--2517 Pacifics, mostly on the outer line. Our daily tally: 261 Red-throats, 2892 Pacifics.

The volume of scoters (180 Surf) and alcids (112 Rhino Auklets, 349 Common Murres, 2 Marbled Murrelets, 4 Ancient Murrelets) was just a trickle today.

We did have a huge scrum for several hours just off Pt. Pinos - hundreds of California Gulls, with good numbers of Heermann's and Western and a sprinkling of Bonaparte's, Short-billed, Herring, Glaucous-winged, and Thayer's. Thanksgiving dinner across the species...including for the bruiser of a Pomarine Jaeger that went gull-to-gull demanding tribute.

Other birds of note: A Downy Woodpecker - my first from Seawatch (and the first for Seawatch's eBird hotspot, though there are a few for the Pt. Pinos general hotspot). 659 Brown Pelicans flew out of the bay during the sunset hour, presumably full of baitfish. A Brown Pelican consumes up to 4 pounds of fish per day; imagining the biomass of the scrum that supplied nourishment to so many pelicans (and gulls, cormorants, and Risso's dolphins) really made me, on this day of intentional gratitude, appreciate the life Monterey Bay sustains.

-Alison Vilag

eBird checklist: https://ebird.org/tripreport/436435