A big Surf Scoter flight and the Nazca Booby that continued for a third day (but had seemingly departed for parts yet unknown by the last hours of the count) highlighted this year's edition of Thanksgiving Seawatch. A lot of passers-by expressed surprise that the count continues on Thanksgiving--but southbound birds don't know it's a holiday, and when you're a migration counter you run on bird time and not human time, which I love. (Last year, 2023, our biggest flight of the whole year fell on Thanksgiving!)
Anyway, we had 4069 Surf Scoters at Seawatch today. The flight was heaviest from 1100-sunrise, with the heaviest hours being 1300 (894) and sunset hour (891). The bulk of the flight today was big, low bay-cutting flocks >60 that, though distant, looked like these awesome freight trains of southbound scoters. We had a couple >200 flocks in sunset hour that did pass directly in front of the Seawatch. This was marvelous--the amount of motion in a Surf Scoter flock this size, the twisting and coming together and stringing out and rising and falling and just sort of spilling across a sunset sky--is something that will always be jaw-droppingly beautiful to me, no matter how many times I see it. One of these big flocks had two Black Scoters at the very end, which was a fun identification via silhouette... I think Kai got cool photos. In total, we had 4 Black Scoters and 1 White-winged today.
The Nazca Booby went undetected for about an hour after the count started, then just sort of appeared on the Point rocks, where it slept and preened until somewhat after 1300, when it departed. (Interestingly, this is the same hour where it left yesterday, too!). I caught a glimpse of it in flight over the bay, distant and to the east of Pt. Pinos, during the 1500 hour. For me, it was just as exciting to randomly come across a huge black-and-white booby on a scope scan as it was when the booby first showed up two days ago. I watched it forage for a few minutes but it never came back to land that I noticed.
Otherwise, it was a quiet day! Just 235 Common Murres, 6 Rhinoceros Auklets, 5 Ancient Murrelets, and 5 Marbled Murrelets; 140 Red-throated and 369 Pacific Loons; 14 Northern Fulmars, 1 Pink-footed Shearwater, 1 Sooty Shearwater (and the mystery white tubenose again!), and our only (identified) jaeger today was a Parasitic.
See the full checklist here: https://ebird.org/tripreport/296495
-Alison Vilag
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