I talk about seabirds a lot, including what you might see from a whale watch boat, but I don’t actually get out on the water that much. But this past weekend, I lucked out. An old friend was in town and had some extra tickets, so the kids and I got to board a whale watch. This was the first one my kids had ever been on, so it was a big deal. The weather looked iffy Sunday, but I was hearing good things about the whale action out there, so we grabbed our raincoats and headed for the docks with hope in our hearts.
My friend is also an ornithologist – I like to say I ruined his life when I got him into birds back in college – so I didn’t have to bird alone on this trip. As we steamed out of Barnstable Harbor, we noted a few Forster’s Terns, cormorants, and gulls, plus a shorebird or two – it was pretty quiet. After a while we glanced past the rail to see a Red-necked Phalarope fly up the port side – these fun, offshore sandpipers are always a treat to see, and all but impossible to find unless you’re on a boat. Soon a few fluttery, swallow-sized Wilson’s Storm-Petrels appeared, a regular feature of these trips, often seen pattering over plankton patches or slicks of fish oil.
Over the years I’ve been on a lot of whale watches, and seen the whales do their various fun behaviors many times, so, as you might expect, I usually focus on finding interesting birds while the tourists stare slack-jawed at the flipper flapping, bubble feeding behemoths. But on this trip, I would turn out to be just another slack-jawed tourist. I was utterly unprepared for the cetacean show we experienced that day.
As we pulled up to the southern end of Stellwagen Bank, we were immediately surrounded by a staggering biomass of marine mammals. First we noticed how many humpbacks there were - spouts and flukes and pectoral fins in all directions. It soon became apparent that they weren’t alone – filling in all the ocean surface not currently containing whale flesh were dolphins, hundreds of dolphins, first Common Dolphins, then Atlantic White-sided. A couple of what were probably Bottlenose were also in the mix but escaped into the chaos before a boat naturalist could notice. I had never seen anything like this.
Whales were doing things I’ve never seen – humpbacks were doing headstands, where they would emerge from the water fluke first, like teenagers showing off for each other. I didn’t even know they could do that. Groups of young whales lolled about on what the naturalist called a “play date”. I told my kids they were ruined for life – this was not normal, and no future whale watch was likely to top this one. Despite the mammal, show, I found time to notice the birds – Great, Manx, Cory’s, and Sooty Shearwaters all fed amongst the whales and dolphins, snagging whatever sand lances they brought up from below. All of this was due to the sheer abundance of these tiny, mysterious bait fish.
After a while my kids got tired of me, so I started relaying unsolicited bird facts to unsuspecting random people. “You know, those Great Shearwaters are here for their winter, because they came from the other end of the planet in the South Atlantic!”, I would say. They would nod politely, then find somewhere else to stand. “Those ones too – those little storm-petrels came from Antarctica to feed here!” “How interesting” (shuffle shuffle)….
It’s not a trip I’ll soon forget. I would say get out on a whale watch as soon as you can, but the five-day nor’easter we have coming will be shutting down boat trips for a while. Check back next week to see what birds the storm brought in.
And finally, one of the weirder bird reports this week was of a Black Vulture perched on the roof of our sponsors at Birdwatchers General Store in Orleans – a cool sighting of a rare bird, but not exactly the bluebird of happiness. In fact, this whole thing makes me nervous – one of the staff should probably poke Mike if he hasn’t moved in a while.
