Seawatch Report - Nov 2, 2026
Weather: It was fairly calm at the count today, though there was enough wind coming out of the Salinas Valley to whip up the whitecaps. At the outer buoy, the wind was <10 knots and east till around sunset, when it went west. Pressure at the beginning of the day was 30.14; it rose to 30.17 by mid-morning and fell back to 30.13 at sunset. Afternoon swell was pretty substantial - in fact, this afternoon, the Black-vents were so low and the swell was so big that I stood in the bed of the pickup that Amanda and Nathan have generously given me use of this season to see if the additional height was helpful. It is! Visibility was good, it was mostly to partly cloudy all day, and the water temperature in Monterey Bay was 67 degrees.
Bird highlights today -
Another steady period of Surf Scoter movement (2513 total). The 6AM-7AM hour (400) and the 3PM-4PM hours (424) were the biggest. I think the Surf Scoters are some of the most engaging Seawatch ambassadors - several times today, Seawatch's human ambassadors were chatting with passers-by, and almost on cue, scoter flocks would charge past the point in all their shapeshifting magic. So good! Tagging along with the scoter flocks were 2 American Wigeon and 6 Northern Pintail.
A Wilson's Snipe was a first-hour surprise for me and Catherine. It seemed to flush from the beach to the south with some Black Turnstones, it landed briefly on the rocks just below the Point, and then fled inland to better snipe habitat.
The tern procession continued today; terns flew into the bay in the morning and out of the bay in the afternoon. I had 10 Royal Terns in one hour this morning, and I believe this number is not a double-count: all terns flew into the bay during this hour. The most Royal Terns seen at any one time today was 4. I apologize for all the eBird alerts for this species... we had just 2 jaegers today: a Parasitic and a Pom.
Our first-of-season kittiwake, a stunning 1st-cycle at kelp-line distance, was spotted by Paul (our first-of-season Paul, too...).
Alcids: Kai and Kaiting got on an interesting murrelet - likely one of the "southern" sp., that landed before it could be identified. We also had 6 Rhinos, 26 Cassin's, 1 Marbled Murrelet (like yesterday's, on the water), 1 Pigeon Guillemot, 62 Common Murres. I saw a flying fish in the same field of view as a dead murre this morning.
Loons: 11 Red-throats, 46 Pacifics, 26 Commons.
Tubenoses: 16 fulmars; 166 Black-vents. (79 of these were in the 3PM-4PM hour).
The day's landbird highlight was the Tropical Kingbird, which watched the sunrise in the parking lot with us this morning.
-Alison Vilag
See the full trip report here: https://ebird.org/tripreport/591312
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