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Heading Offshore to Catch Sight of One of the "Holy Grails" of Massachusetts Seabirds

Anita Ritenour / flickr
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CC BY 2.0

Sixty hardy souls steamed out of Hyannis Harbor last weekend aboard the Helen H, heading for the offshore waters east of Monomoy. But this boat wasn’t dragging for scallops or longlining for swordfish – it was chartered by the Brookline Bird Club, and their quarry was winter seabirds. 

While winter boat trips can be bruising, brutally cold affairs in these parts, these birders beat the odds and enjoyed calm, mild conditions for the duration of the trip, on which they tallied an impressive list of offshore birds, not to mention both humpback and fin whales and a pod of dolphins.

 

Their haul included more than 30,000 common eiders, 2500 long-tailed ducks, a couple of northern fulmars, and one of the only February records of a Sooty Shearwater – a species that should be well into the austral summer breeding season right now on islands off Tierra Del Fuego, almost 9000 miles to our south. The unusually warm water and tremendous abundance of baitfish off the Outer Cape this past fall kept this and other shearwaters in the area well past their normal departure date. But the real prize on this trip was one of the Holy Grails of Massachusetts seabirds – the undeniably charismatic Atlantic Puffin. You’ve probably seen the stock photos of these birds with a dozen or more baitfish lined up neatly in their Technicolor bills. Looking like the product of an after-hours dalliance between a parrot and a penguin at the local zoo, the Atlantic Puffin is an iconic species. How many birds have their own cereal? Well, aside from the cartoonish Toucan Sam and that undignified, alleged cuckoo from Cocoa Puffs, of course. Atlantic Puffins nest on offshore islands from Maine northwards through the Canadian Maritimes, and tend to winter offshore of those areas.

 

Folks on the west coast are lucky to have two different cousins of our Atlantic puffin: the nearly identical Horned Puffin of Alaska and the flamboyantly coiffed Tufted Puffin, which nests on pinnacle rocks from California to Alaska. A Tufted Puffin looks as though it has a Trump-style combover on each side of its head, and is definitely worth a Google image search if you have the time.

 

Puffins are the best known representatives of an otherwise obscure group of birds known as alcids, all which could be accurately described as flying penguins of the northern hemisphere. The Cape might be the best place on the east coast to see alcids from land, especially the often abundant Razorbill.

In fact, a couple of land-based observers at Race Point in Provincetown last week recorded over 12,000 Razorbills in one morning, as well as good numbers of the less common alcid species, including over 100 Common Murres, 4 Thick-billed Murres, 4 Dovekies, and 4 Black Guillemots, but alas, no puffins. Since they are only around in winter and tend to stay offshore, well out of sight of land, the people who have seen puffins on the Cape tend to be either fishermen or those few birders who have put in many, many hard hours peering into post-nor’easter winds at places like First Encounter Beach in Eastham.

 

So you probably shouldn’t hold your breath on seeing a puffin on Cape Cod, but if you want to increase your chances, I think there are some scallop draggers looking for deck hands.

Mark Faherty writes the Weekly Bird Report.