Winter birding on and off North Carolina's Outer Banks

Last weekend I led a group of Nicholas School of the Environment graduate students on a grand birding tour of North Carolina's Outer Banks.

We hit up all best hotspots--Bodie Island Lighthouse, Oregon Inlet, Pea Island, Cape Point--and spent Sunday offshore with Brian Patteson looking for pelagics.  All told we racked up a whopping 58 non-passerine species.

The frigid winter has made for an excellent year for ducks in North Carolina and on Saturday we managed to stumble upon 17 duck species.

Highlights included this confiding Redhead near the Hatteras lighthouse...

Redhead, Cape Hatteras

... and beautiful views of dabblers by the Bodie island lighthouse, such as some gorgeous drake Northern Pintail...

Northern Pintail, Bodie Island lighthouse pond

...but it was the assortment of sea ducks at Oregon Inlet that stole the show.

Harlequin Duck, Oregon Inlet

Surf Scoter, Oregon Inlet

Harlequin Duck, Surf Scoter and five White-winged Scoters, Oregon Inlet

 We birded the banks Saturday because wind kept us from going offshore, but our trip aboard the Stormy Petrel II on Sunday, with calm winds and unseasonably warm air, was the most pleasant winter pelagic I've ever been on.

Nicholas School students checking out life on the edge of the gulf stream

Slack winds made the ocean glassy and it was unusually easy to spot alcids on the water.

Razorbill, pelagic off Hatteras

Dovekie, pelagic off Hatteras

 We followed a sharp color change for several miles, which was teaming with birds and other sea life.  I had never seen so many huge flocks of Bonaparte's Gulls and Red Phalaropes.

 Manx Shearwaters are expected in winter and we saw several.

Manx Shearwater, pelagic off Hatteras

 But a Sooty Shearwater was a rare treat!

Sooty Shearwater, pelagic off Hatteras

It flew in and fought with the gull flock for chum scraps for half an hour!

For many of the students the bird life on this trip was outshone by other sea creatures, such as loggerhead sea turtles, a basking shark, bottlenose dolphins and a whopping 25 (or so) Manta Rays!

Manta ray with remoras, pelagic off Hatteras

 This was a lifer for me, but I'll admit I was more excited about the life bird I saw this trip.  More to come on this in a later post, but *hint* it was a gull.

A fun time was had by all.

The group at Hatteras lighthouse

 A big thanks to Brian Patteson and Kate Sutherland for running another awesome pelagic trip, to Jeff Lemons for helping spot birds and to my co-leaders Nicki and Natalia.

Spotting on the Stormy Petrel II part 2

Spotting on the Stormy Petrel II

For the second time I enthusiastically jumped at the opportunity to spot on one of  Brian Patteson's Pelagic trips out of Cape Hatteras.  The first time was last August, but I actually have more experience off shore in the wintertime, so I felt relatively qualified.

Of course everybody wants an albatross now, so meeting expectations is tough!

No albatross, but we ended up having an awesome day for birds.  Great Skua is almost always the top (reasonable) target and we had decent looks at two!  There were more Manx Shearwaters around than I had ever seen with as many as four visible at a time and a count for the trip around 20.  A few flocks of Red Phalaropes made a brief showing as well.

But the alcid numbers on the trip were absurd.  They were, roughly: 1000 Razorbills, 100 Dovekies and 10 Atlantic Puffins. (edit--official alcid counts were: 2000 Razorbills, 232 Dovekies, and 15 puffins).

Immature Atlantic Puffin

To me those numbers say there should have been 1 Murre out there somewhere to fill out the 10-fold alcid dilution ratio.  Sadly I wasn't able to spot one. 

 My proud moment instead came from spotting an odd bird in the Hitchcockian gull flock (fortunately they're just after chum and not us)...

See anything unusual?

 That's right an Iceland Gull!  I had never seen an adult before, so while not a tick, I still felt like this was a "lifer."

Adult Iceland Gull - it has some faint gray in the wingtips making it a kumlieni

More details on this trip can be found at Brian's Seabirding blog. A big thanks to Brian and Kate for having me aboard.

After the successful pelagic, Ed Corey was nice enough to me up for the night at Jockey's Ridge State Park.  Early the next morning, before heading onto Mattamuskeet (where I would stumble upon a White-faced Ibis), Mark Koseiwski and I ventured out into the dunes to find a flock of four Snow Buntings.

Snow Buntings

I had been trying to see this species at the coast of NC all winter, so I was glad to finally see this little flock!

Hopefully I'll get back out to Hatteras once the spring/summer season starts up...

More on the Hatteras pelagic...

To give my last post a bit more context, the Black-browed Albatross will be only the fifth formally accepted record of the species for the United States (once the NC records committee gets a chance to vote on it) with 10 or so other unconfirmed reports over the years (source). And it is only the second report of any kind from North Carolina waters with a first being a sight record of two birds seen in the 70s .

Obviously the Black-browed Albatross, for its incredible improbability and stunning beauty, stole the show from what had already been fabulous winter pelagic trip off Hatteras.

The weather was mild and the sea was calm (at least by afternoon). Our first rare bird of the day appeared almost instantly: an Iceland Gull, not 15 minutes out of port in the sound. I had seen a few of these on the pelagic trip I took February last year and got some great photos, so like lack of sunlight and photo opportunity didn't bother me.

Moments later we cruised by a flock of about 60 Brant, a goose species found on salt water that can be elusive within North Carolina (NC bird #302!).

Out on the open ocean we weren't finding the incredible density of alcids that we had last year; one Dovekie skittered away from the boat and I saw small groups of Razorbills here and there. But we found almost all the typical winter pelagic species that I had missed last year including a few Manx Shearwaters (lifer #1546), Great Skuas (lifer #1548), one lone Northern Fulmar (lifer #1549), and several groups of Red Phalaropes.

Red Phalaropes (lifer #1547!); so cool to see shorebirds at home on the open ocean

The phalaropes were working along an obvious contrast between warm blue gulf stream water and cold green water.

more phalaropes with a Bonaparte's Gull; at a distance these two birds can look remarkably similar

The confluence of nutrient-rich cold water and the gulf stream drives a hotspot of primary productivity, attracted fish and other marine macrofauna. Not-birds included Bottlenose and Spotted Dolphins, but most impressive were the abundance of Loggerhead Sea Turtles.

Loggerhead Sea Turtle

We noticed 30 to 40 bobbing past and several that exhibited some really odd behavior...turtles swimming on their backs with flippers out of the water. One even craned its head out of its shell above water and opened its mouth showing its beak. I guess this was some sort of threat display because it proceeded to approach our boat and bite at the hull! Weird. I hope some turtle experts can offer some interpretation.