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INSTITUTE FOR FIELD ORNITHOLOGY

2005 IFO Pacific Northwest Seabirds Report

Instructor: Dennis Paulson . 10-16 February 2005 . Coastal Washington State

The workshop was a great success, with excellent weather the entire time—not the norm in this part of the world—and cooperative birds everywhere we went. The group started with a visit to the Slater Museum of History in Tacoma, where the 10 participants were treated to tables full of Northwest seabird specimens to admire and compare. After that, we headed north to Mount Vernon, the center of our first few days of field work, with a side trip to the Skagit Flats to watch the concentration of thousands of Snow Geese that winter there. Unexpectedly, the entire flock feeding in an open field took to the air at once with deafening cries when a Bald Eagle swooped in and apparently caught one of the geese. As they flew off to settle out on Skagit Bay, two Short-eared Owls coursed over the fields and a Peregrine watched the spectacle from the top of a nearby barn.

On a scouting trip a few days earlier, I had discovered substantial concentrations of birds in Drayton Harbor and along Semiahmoo Spit, near the Canadian border, and that was our first destination the next day. It proved beyond expectations, with large numbers of many species with beautiful views in full sunshine of loons, grebes, waterfowl, gulls, and shorebirds. We were so full of seabirds by mid-afternoon that by popular demand we deviated from the seabirds for a few hours and visited the raptor-rich Samish Flats east of Padilla Bay. One of the participants had tallied the Short-eared Owl as a life bird on the first afternoon and really wanted to see a Gyrfalcon, and, as no one argued against this, we went right to the spot where a bird was known to be wintering, and there it was. This bird, returning for its second winter, was ridiculously tame, and people could walk up right under its telephone pole to take photos. While there, we were treated to a Merlin and numerous harriers, eagles, and buteos, as well as many more dabbling ducks. We realized the Gyrfalcon was eating something, so I walked over and found Green-winged Teal feathers beneath it.

The next day presented us with another "high point of the workshop" when we went out on a boat trip from La Conner well into the San Juan Islands and back. Birds were constantly in sight, Bald Eagles everywhere, and we enjoyed our first alcids of several species, as well as more loons, grebes, and sea ducks. One rock had Surfbirds, Black Turnstones, and Rock Sandpipers, another Black Oystercatchers. Again, no one complained that these weren't the seabirds advertised for the workshop. The long boat ride also gave us looks at several species of marine mammals.

On the following day, we left Mount Vernon and headed across to the coast and down Whidbey Island, ending up on the ferry across to Port Townsend. The west coast of Whidbey is well known for its large numbers of seabirds, and we weren't disappointed. One of the high points of the day was studying all three of the Pacific Northwest cormorants, including some of each in breeding plumage, in a roosting flock in the beautiful late afternoon sunlight. Everywhere we went, we seemed to catch the lighting just right, so all birds were presented at their most stunning. Of course we were always on the lookout for foraging behavior, flight styles, and courtship behavior, and we were gratified by how much bird behavior we were able to observe.

Our last full day was spent around Port Townsend, including several projecting points with seabirds (many Marbled Murrelets!) streaming past, and west to Dungeness Bay, a shallow bay behind a long sand spit that furnished still more species for our list and more education about bird identification and behavior. On our final day, we visited Fort Flagler State Park in the morning, where more shorebirds were seen as well as a good final review of numerous seabird species, and everyone was delivered on time back to the hotel near SeaTac.

Our trip total was 105 species, a good number for that time of year, as we spent relatively little time looking for songbirds. We averaged about 60 species each day and saw exciting Northwest birds such as Pacific Loons, Trumpeter Swans, Brant, Eurasian Wigeons, Long-tailed and Harlequin Ducks, Barrow's Goldeneyes, Black Oystercatchers, Pigeon Guillemots, and Rhinoceros Auklets almost every day. We had dinners at several outstanding restaurants and tasty box lunches. I can truthfully say the workshop went essentially perfectly from start to finish, and I hope for an equally successful rerun next year.

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