Seawatch Report - Nov 6, 2026

Weather: At the outer buoy at sunrise, the wind was blowing from the WNW at 21 knots. By 8AM it had dropped to 15, and to <5 knots by 11 AM. During the afternoon, the wind rose gradually back to 15 knots by 2PM. Pressure was 30.08 at sunrise. It rose to 30.13 at 10:30, and had dropped again to 30.05 by sunset. The swell was big - today's precipitation could have been classified as "salt spray." It was partly cloudy. The kelvin wave compounding the tide had water up to nearly the bench an hour BEFORE high tide. 15 minutes before that, I scrambled to the beach to retrieve a washed-up balloon. There was a dead murre. The water in Monterey Bay was 68 degrees.

On the Seawatching front, it was memorably good. We like to have a Pom (jaeger) a day - doctor's orders - and we LOVE to have EIGHTEEN Poms a day! Especially when they're flying at the kelpline, when they still have their ridiculous spooner tail feathers, and when they come out of the bay 5 at a time! There is such vast plumage variation with these birds; no one looks exactly the same as the others. My personal favorite - the one that was dark, dark chocolate which really made the silvery wing-flash pop, that of course had its full spooner regalia still, that was part of that flock of 5. All jaegers today (9 Parasitics, 18 Poms) were flying out of the bay without altering course to steal food from gulls and terns. Most of today's jaegers came by in the afternoon; we even had one after 5PM.

Black-vented Shearwaters were our other marquee bird of today's Seawatch. We tallied 8623 today. Their afternoon flight from 2PM-5PM was mesmerizing, at the rate of 1000+/hr. (the high hour: 2508, from 2PM-3PM). I was really happy that Bill showed up and offered to click Black-vents during this time, for this made it easier to tear myself away from the wave-troughs and to scan the sky for high scoters. Imagine a little white river of shearwaters flowing out of the bay, arcing up, cascading down, deep into the bay and deep out of the bay, really as far as the limits of our field of view. They were perhaps best appreciated with binoculars - a spotting scope didn't quite translate the magnitude of the movement. In the 5 years I've been here, this is the most Black-vents I've ever seen, and I am loving it.

Other noteworthies -

-Our first-of-season flock of Cackling Geese (36) flying north towards Santa Cruz, like all non-Brant geese typically do.

-1200 Surf Scoters (and 1 Black); the scoter flight today was heaviest at 3PM-5PM.

-3 "southern" murrelets, all too distant for confidence beyond 2 Scripp's/Guadalupe (flying together) and 1 probable Craveri's. These were all mid-late afternoon birds flying out of the bay. 97 Common Murres today.

-130 Bonaparte's Gulls, 76 Elegant Terns, 1 Royal Tern, and a small influx of Short-billed and American Herring Gulls.

-Our first triple-digit day of Pacific Loons (231, with a 3PM-4PM peak hour of 54); 26 Red-throats and 27 Commons.

-1 American Kestrel, flying out across the ocean towards Santa Cruz.

We also had Risso's dolphins today - my first sighting of these for the season; common dolphins have been more prevalent.

-Alison Vilag

See the full trip report here: https://ebird.org/tripreport/592552