Birding on Monterey Bay

I made a reservation weeks ago to take a pelagic birding trip offered by Shearwater Journeys in Monterey, California. I left San Mateo early on Saturday afternoon, having spent the morning cleaning my apartment and running errands. I took the scenic route down to Monterrey down through the Santa Cruz Mountains along Highways 35, 9, and 1. I checked into the Lone Oak Inn in Monterey. Judging by the number of wetsuits I saw hanging outside the rooms, it is a hotel which caters to surfers and divers.

The next morning I got up earl and drove down to Fisherman’s Warf and met the boat, which was called the Checkmate. It turned out to be a pretty full boat, with about 20 to 25 people of various ages, genders, and nationalities. All of them were either birders or birders’ spouses, of course. Some names there I recognized from some of the birding newsgroups I subscribe to.

The idea of a pelagic birding trip is to see birds which live over the ocean a rarely come within sight of land. Monterey Bay is a particularly good place to see such birds because the water is unusually deep just off shore. Within minutes of leaving the harbor I got my first life-list bird of the day: a Sooty Shearwater. By the end of the day, I would be seeing Sooty Shearwaters until I didn’t care much about them anymore. Within the next couple hours, I got four more life-list birds: Pink-footed Shearwaters, Bullers Shearwaters, Black-footed Albatrosses, and Sabine’s Gulls.

Albatrosses, by the way, are incredible looking birds in the air. No still picture really shows how amazing those long, long wings look as they are flapping.

In addition to birds, there were marine mammals: Harbor Seals, California Sea lions, Humpback Whales, Pacific White-sided Dolphins, and Russo’s Dolphins.

I had a good time, and it was a successful day of birding. (There have been very few times when I have gotten five life list birds in one day.) Still, having tried it, I have decided that pelagic birding is my least favorite mode of birding. About 90% of the individual birds I saw were three or four species of gulls I could have seen on shore, and about 90% of the rest were Sooty Shearwaters, so basically you spend your time looking for the other one percent of the birds out there. Also, it can be frustrating if you aren’t use to it. It’s an awfully big ocean and some of the birds you are looking for are small and hard to see. I missed about half the birds which were seen from the boat which would have been life-list birds for me. Finally, out on the water when there aren’t any interesting birds or other animals around, there isn’t anything else to look at but waves. On land, if there aren’t any birds, there are always trees, wildflowers, and bugs to look at.

One more thing that weekend: while on the boat I heard about a sighting of a Crested Caracara in Santa Cruz County. This is a bird which usually isn’t found north of Mexico. On my way home from Monterey I stopped where it had been seen. I didn’t find it then, but I returned the next day (Labor Day) and found it.