The cool thing about going to Maine is that I get to see birds I would never see at home.  This northern gannet is a perfect example.  There’s no way this huge sea bird with a six and a half foot wingspan would be found taking a nose dive in the Monongahela River.  He needs deep saltwater for his livelihood.

I’ve seen northern gannets from the shores of Virginia and Florida in the winter but they’re far away and look like tiny arrowheads.  To get a closeup like this and to see a host of birds who never come near shore, I have to travel far off the coast on a pelagic tour.

Maine Audubon has an annual pelagic tour in October that goes 40 miles off the coast of Bar Harbor, but I’ll be in Pittsburgh then.  What to do?  A Maine birder gave me a tip:  You can see pelagic birds on the Whale Watch.  The goals of these two boat trips are different but the whale watch looks for whales up to 20 miles offshore and pelagic birds are often in the vicinity of whales because both are looking for food-filled patches of ocean.  He also said that if you can pick any day to make the trip, go when the wind is light – otherwise the wave action hides the loafing birds. 

So I went on the whale watch Wednesday morning when the waves were less than a foot high.  The weather was great and I met another birder, Andy Block, who leads birding tours to Costa Rica for Tico Tours.  For a landlubber like me sea birds are often confusing so I was really glad Andy was there to tell me what they were: 

• Sooty shearwaters (life bird!) and greater shearwaters.   
• Pomarine and parasitic jaegars.  New to me: the Pomarine’s tail feathers look twisted.
• Wilson’s storm-petrels, the size of starlings.  They patter the water with their feet.
• Black guillemots, razorbills (wish I’d seen them better) and possibly a puffin (another life bird, riding the waves and very hard to see). 
• Huge rafts of common eiders, mostly brown females and immatures, 
• And my very favorites, the northern gannets, taking nose dives into the sea.

I do enjoy these trips!  And now you see why I was thinking about waves this week.

p.s.  I nearly forgot to mention we did see a whale – one finback – plus harbor seals and harbor porpoises.

(photo by Kim Steininger.  Click on the photo to read Kim’s blog describing how she captured it.)

September 2, 2009

This is no news to people who live by the sea but to those who are landlocked or work indoors the ocean looks powerful but benign when you’re standing on high ground.

Though it’s been 10 days since it happened, all the talk among the tourists at Acadia National Park is about the killer wave from Hurricane Bill on August 23, 2009 which swept over spectators near Thunder Hole, injuring more than a dozen people, dragging three into the sea and killing one of them, a seven-year-old girl.

My grainy photo above doesn’t show the horror of that moment.  Paul Colby of Belfast, Maine was there and captured the aftermath of the wave with people crouching and trying to get back to dry land. More spectators had been sitting on the rocks where the foam was churning, but they’re gone. Click here for Paul’s photo and here for the article in the Bangor Daily News.

Tropical Storm Danny was threatening the coast with similar weather when we arrived in New England on Saturday.  We spent a very wet, windy, gray day in New Hampshire and have had beautiful weather ever since.  We’ve had no desire to look at waves.  We hear they’re only 1-2 feet high today.  Good!

(photo by Kate St. John, taken in 2010)

…a closer look.

For as many times as I’d been to Florida I’d never seen a sandwich tern.  They may have flown by me in years past, but fast-moving gulls and terns are hard for me to identify.  I just don’t see them often enough to be good at it.  Pittsburgh is sorely lacking an oceanfront.

Last year Chuck Tague gave me a good tip on identifying terns and I wrote it in my field guide:  Look at the bills and legs.  What color and shape is the bill?  What color are the legs?

Caspian terns are easy.  They’re big and stocky and their bills look like fat carrots attached to their faces.

I now see that sandwich terns are easy too.  They’re the only “crested” tern with a black bill, and it’s a very fancy one – all black with a yellow tip.  This color combination is quite unique.  Plenty of birds have black-tipped yellow bills but in searching my field guide I can find only one other bird with a yellow-tipped black bill:  the Sabine’s gull.  I wonder why.

Another puzzle was their name.  Why are they called “sandwich” terns?  Isn’t Sandwich in England?

Again, my land-lubber roots were showing.  If I lived near the ocean I’d know that seabirds can easily occur worldwide because they find food everywhere there’s salt water – and so it is with sandwich terns.  They nest on the coasts of Europe, North and South America, and winter on the coasts of the Americas, the Mediterranean, Africa, India and the Middle East.   Birds born here are sometimes found in the Netherlands and U.K. in winter – and vice versa.

This also explains their name, given to them by John Latham in 1787 from a specimen found at Sandwich Bay, Kent, England.   Back then they bred there.  Interestingly, their Latin name recently changed from Sterna sandvicensis to Thalasseus sandvicensis after DNA tests put them in a different genus.  The “sandwich” part remains the same.

At Ponce Inlet I had a good long look at the terns as they stood in a mixed flock facing the wind only 12 feet away.  I could easily see how different they were from Forster’s terns.  (Click on the photo to see for yourself – a Forster’s tern standing between two sandwich terns.)

And finally, you can tell I’ve been birding with pun-master Chuck Tague for six days because I started this blog with an “almost” pun.  I veered away from it just in time.

(photos by Chuck Tague)

Dr. Seuss was talking about fish but when I received these two photos from Deb Acklin this title immediately came to mind.

Here are two unusual characters you’re never going to see at home.  Deb saw them at the Galapagos Islands last month.

Meet the red-footed booby and the blue-footed booby.

No lie!  These birds are called boobies from the Spanish word for dunce because they’re very clumsy on land.  Their fancy feet aren’t made for walking, they’re made for impressing the opposite sex.  Same idea as stiletto heels.

The two species have different nesting habits (red-footed boobies nest in trees, blue-footed on the ground) but they have similar courtship displays in which their feet play a part.

During courtship the males of both species point their bills and tails at the sky, raise their wings and, most importantly, display their feet.  The blue-footed booby even does a dance in which he lifts and stamps each foot to show it off.

All this is to impress the ladies who are flying by in hopes one of them will stop and get to know him.  If she does, the pair will put their feet to another use – incubating the eggs.  Boobies don’t have a brood patch so they use their feet, just like their relatives the northern gannets.

Interestingly, female blue-footed boobies have bluer feet than the males.  Click on the picture to see how blue they can get!

The boobies’ courtship efforts are successful at the Galapagos but their nesting success depends on the food supply – fish – and the food supply is governed by ocean temperature.  During an El Niño event, the ocean heats up and the fish go elsewhere.  This spells trouble for the boobies.  Their chicks starve, with as much as 70% nest failure for red-footed boobies who lay only one egg per year.  Even if the chicks survive, during an El Niño they grow so slowly that it takes a year to mature.

Sadly, red-footed boobies face another threat.  Unlike blue-footeds whose largest breeding population is on the Galapagos, red-footed boobies breed on many Pacific islands.  In some places they are in decline because the islanders eat them.

Fortunately the Galapagos has protection programs to keep the birds safe.   I hope to go there some day and see these fancy feet for myself.

(photos taken at the Galapagos Islands by Deborah Acklin)