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| Northern Fulmar |
This week I got to go on a pelagic trip to Cox Ledge southeast of Block Island. The trip was set up by Sue Palmer and Carlos Pedro. They did a great job setting the trip up. It was well organized and fun. The weather was perfect and the birds cooperated.
The trip was from 7am-3pm. It takes a couple hours to get to Cox Ledge. The time flew by because I was talking to my friend Scott for most of the ride out there.
The trip started off very slow. On our way out we didn't even see a Wilson's Storm Petrel. This is a common species, so if we didn't see those, we thought we could be in for a bad day. Luckily, when we ended up chumming we did have a great variety.
On our trip we had two jaeger species. We had an adult Pomarine Jaeger and a Parasitic. I got to see both but had a much better view of the Pom. I did miss two species, there was a Red Necked Pharalope next to the boat but I was on the other side. More importantly we had a South Polar Skua but only a few people saw that. The Skua would have been a lifer. Nothing I could do about it, so I just considered it water under the bridge (or bow).
We had two species of Shearwaters. Great and Sooty Shearwaters were common. Some of the Great Shearwaters were feeding in the slick next to the boat. I'm not sure why we didn't see any Cory's or Manx. Maybe the water is a little chilly for the Cory's. We ended up with 115 Wilson Storm Petrels. They were everywhere once we started chumming.
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| Great Shearwater |
The best bird of the day for me was Northern Fulmar. It was a bird I really wanted to see and a lifer. We had one fly behind the boat pretty far away but I got to see it and get a photo of a white dot on the horizon. But, fifteen minutes later, presumably the same bird, came to the stern and hung out there about thirty minutes. I thought all of my photos were blurry and was very disappointed, but when it came close to the boat a second time, I ended up getting five clean shots.
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