If you’ve visited a bay beach between Brewster and Wellfleet this past week, you may have noticed enormous, Hitchcockian concentrations of seabirds, mostly gulls, which may have been unsettling given that it was Halloween week. If you overcame your urge to flee to a nearby house, you may have eventually figured out what was going on. The many dead, silvery fish in the wrack line were the clue - we were in the midst of an epic wreck of an obscure but abundant North Atlantic baitfish, the mysterious Atlantic saury.
This saury situation happens to some degree each fall when some become trapped in the bay, though only in certain years do we get massive numbers of these fish coming inshore, washing up dead, and spiking seabird numbers. Saury are pretty unique-looking, like a cross between a big sardine and a swordfish. They are long and silvery, up to maybe a foot long but mostly smaller, and have a long, thin, reddish beak lined with small teeth. Invariably there are social media posts asking what these fish are, and just as invariably, even long-time, salty locals misidentify them as various other similar species. “That’s a half-beak”, that’s a ballyhoo”, or “that’s a needlefish”. Those are all similar species but they are not even in the same family as Atlantic saury and mostly don’t occur here in any numbers. This “saury wreck” phenomenon has been recorded at least as far back as the 1800s, so I’m not sure why folks still stubbornly refuse to acknowledge their true identity.
I had heard that some saury were washing up last week, but I was unprepared for what I saw from a Brewster bayside beach on Friday afternoon – an uninterrupted swath of thousands of seabirds spanning the horizon from Wellfleet to Dennis. Mostly it was Herring and Black-backed Gulls and gannets, all there to gorge on this bounty of bait, plus smaller numbers of Cory’s Shearwater’s lumbering amongst the resting gulls, and the occasional jaeger mugging the others for a free fish. At one point an athletic, barrel-chested Pomarine Jaeger flew past close in perfect afternoon light, fresh from stealing a fish from a gull, mocking me for not having my camera on me.
Normally I would dutifully tally numbers and submit an eBird list, but I punted this time, partly because I had to be somewhere and partly because I was overwhelmed by the scene. I came back for more over the weekend. On Saturday I found the sauries swimming up the boat ramp at Rock Harbor in Orleans, like they were meeting someone in the parking lot – eventually my kids joined me and had fun “saving” the seemingly suicidal fish. Whenever a gull pulled a saury out of the water, six others would start chasing it, as if this was some rare treasure, when in fact there were millions and they easily could have gotten their own. I tried to explain to the gulls that this kind of behavior is why they have a PR problem.
On Sunday I spent some time counting – at least 3000 Northern Gannets were plunge diving over sauries off Brewster, amongst a similar number of gulls. Each gannet has a six foot wingspan and weighs seven pounds, so imagine a 10-ton, 18,000 foot feeding frenzy, and you’ll get an idea of what a spectacular wildlife show this was. Cory’s Shearwaters, normally scarce by now and hard to see from land, were everywhere you looked. At another landing I found where all the smaller gulls – Laughing and Ring-billed Gulls, were segregating from the bigger gulls at the mouth of a creek. Multiple Laughing Gulls seemed to be regretting their food choices - they were just standing around with the entire tail-half of a saury sticking out of their mouth while they apparently waited for the business end to digest. It didn’t look comfortable, especially considering the sharp beak of the fish poking their little gull tummies.
Things seemed to be winding down on Monday, though there were still plenty of seabirds and saury when I checked First Encounter beach in Eastham. So it’s worth a check if you’ve missed the show thus far. I bet you’ll run into someone eager to tell you about the “needlefish” or “half-beaks”, at which point you can gently correct them. Frankly, I think all these people misidentifying these poor fish should say “saury”.
