It’s now high season for that traditional tourist activity, the whale watch. Us jaded locals probably don’t take advantage of this activity enough, though we live in one of just a handful of places in North America where it’s easy to see whales close to land. The whales are indeed spectacular – you have a good chance of seeing the second largest animal to ever live, the bigger-than-a-brachiosaurus Fin Whale, perhaps a playful humpback calf, or maybe even some frolicking dolphins. But I’m here to remind you about those equally amazing seabirds peppering the waters around your whales, for they, too, have some astounding stories to tell.
Great Shearwaters, for example, have an annual migration that traces a figure 8 across the North and South Atlantic oceans, buzzing first the Azores and West Africa, then Brazil and Argentina after leaving our waters in the fall. By our winter they are back breeding on the most remote archipelago on earth, roughly halfway between Buenos Aires and Cape Town, the Tristan de Cunha islands, which they share with fake, Dr. Seuss-sounding but real birds like Rockhopper Penguins and Broad-billed Prions. If you see either of those on a whale watch here it's time get your medications adjusted.
We also live in a part of the world where you can’t swing a dead cetacean without hitting a marine biologist, so it’s unsurprising that scientists study shearwaters here. Biologists with Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary have been putting satellite transmitters on Great Shearwaters to study their movements with respect to food resources and their age, among other things. They name the birds they track, and while the names are mostly serious, my two favorites are Birdy McBirdface and Britney Shears - I swear they didn’t let me name those birds. Some of the same local researchers also studied plastic ingestion in Great Shearwaters throughout the entire Atlantic and found, soberingly, that each bird had an average of 9 pieces of plastic in its gut.
Sooty, Manx, and Cory’s are the other shearwaters you might see, and they come from the southern hemisphere, the North Atlantic, and the Mediterranean, respectively, to feed in our fish-rich waters. Sooty Shearwaters can travel 1000 miles in a single day, with barely a flap, when wind conditions are ideal, and one Manx Shearwater tracked by researchers was estimated to have flown 5 million miles over its 50-year life. Somebody somehow figured out that they can fly straight back to their burrow if you move them hundreds of miles away from their nest, even inland. I’m trying to imagine how they figured that out – maybe an ornithologist accidentally flew home with one in a jacket pocket? It happens to the best of us.
As with all birding around here, there’s always the possibility of a rare and out-range species showing up. On a recent whale watch to the northern part of Stellwagen, some birders got just such a booby prize in the form of, well, an actual booby – a Brown Booby to be precise. This warm water seabird has become oddly regular in the Gulf of Maine in recent years, as if they read that scientific paper showing that its surface waters are warming faster than those of any other water body in the world.
If you want to sample these seabirds, but can’t stomach the boat, or the prices, then you’re in luck, as shearwaters and storm-petrels have lately been viewable from land in places like Head of the Meadow Beach in Truro, Race Point in Provincetown, and even Wellfleet Harbor. So make sure you have binoculars when you’re visiting a beach, because if you’re real lucky, and look really hard, you just might get a celebrity sighting – they say Britney Shears summers here every year. It won’t be that hard to pick her out - she’ll be the shearwater with bodyguards.
