Seawatch Report - Nov 13

Today was great out at the Seawatch: we had a monstrous alcid flight, a sustained stream of Bonaparte's Gulls departing the bay during some of the morning hours, and (per eBird) the Seawatch's second record of White-winged Dove. The dove flew out high towards the coast, then turned around and flew back, high, towards the golf course. It was a pretty cool sighting, especially since Blake Matheson was out there to share it!

Sunrise itself was tame enough, but a half-hour or so into the count, Monterey Bay started erupting Common Murres and Rhinoceros Auklets. We started out valiantly--that is, clicking them individually--but that was a bad decision. At one point when we were reckoning with consequences of our ways I took a binocular scan over the area straight out from the Point, saw at least 150 murres charging through the huge swells, and laughed out loud at the idea that we could count this volume individually. We then switched over to counting by 5s... We tallied 4302 Common Murres and 301 Rhinoceros Auklets today, with the bulk of this flight happening from sunrise-1000, though there was a bit of a resurrection in early afternoon. Our peak Common Murre hour was a whopping 1928 during the first hour of the count. We also had 3 Ancient Murrelets today, which gives me hope of more to come.

The Surf Scoter flight remains quiet: we tallied just 148 today.

Today the Bonaparte's Gulls were actually flying out of the bay rather than circulating around the scrums: I clicked 1066 flying out of the bay during the 0900 hour and didn't really have ANY Bonaparte's after 1100. In fact, it seems like there was a marked larid exodus from the bay today--we had just 5 Elegant Terns and comparatively low gull numbers. A morning Black-legged Kittiwake spotted by Robert Horn was enjoyed, though.

The loon flight was quiet compared to yesterday: 40 Red-throats, 357 Pacifics, and 1 Common; the biggest loon hours were 0700-100 today.

Tubenoses were somewhat scarce today: 16 Northern Fulmars, 1 Sooty Shearwater, and 2 Black-vented Shearwaters.

The swell was enormous this morning and a bit challenging to work with: so much salt spray was hanging in the air that it was hindering visibility, walls of water were breaking at the Point, and the angle of the swell was concealing most birds to the east of the Point. Winds were light all day at the count, but at the outer buoy were NNE 6-13 kt overnight dropping to 2 kt by 0900, switching to SE 6-8 kt in early afternoon then switching to N 6 kt by the count's end. Afternoon was overcast with a few raindrops.

See the full checklist here: https://ebird.org/tripreport/292290

-Alison Vilag