Puffin Run
For the third year in a row, I went on a bird trip hosted by Puget Sound Express. This was my second time going out on their puffin trip — their other trip chases fall migrating birds and is run a couple of times in October. This was the first trip on their larger Port Townsend boat, the Saratoga, which can carry about 150 people, and it was 95% full.
This was my second trip out to Smith Island, which is a protected area off of Whidbey island almost halfway to Lopez Island, and one of the major breeding locations for birds like Puffins (the other, Protection Island, is closer but Puffin populations have been shrinking there over the last number of years). It’s a fast cruise out, and then a slow circuit of the island and its smaller partner, Minor Island, to see what we can see, and the complete trip takes about two hours.
We were not disappointed, with maybe as many as 12 puffins seen as well as many other species — my list for the day totaled 17. None of them were new to me — and again, I missed out on the much less common Horned Puffin, although they’ve been seen on other trips. Another species missed was a crazy bird that had been seen on and off for a week, a Nazca Booby. There are a lot of boobies being seen all around the Pacific Northwest this fall, caused, we think, by the warming ocean to the south pushing birds out of normal territories in search of food — we’re also seeing large numbers of Elegant Terns moving further north than usual as well and both Heermann’s Gulls and Brown Pelicans struggled in the nesting season due to poor food supplies — blame El Niño for this, but even more, blame how ongoing Climate Change is amplifying ocean temperature and disrupting and amplifying weather globally.
My photography was better this trip; it takes some practice to aim and shoot and get sharp images on a moving and rocking boat. Last year’s puffin images were mostly poorly focussed or obscured by a heavy swell, on this trip the water was quite calm and the weather quite pleasant.
I really enjoy these trips; the team running PSE are great, their boats are really well maintained and they really know how to run a fun tour for the birders — their primary trips are, of course, whale watching and I’ve heard nothing but good about those trips (and Laurie and I both plan on taking them at some point) — we had a couple of very distant Orca seen on the way home, but nothing like on a formal Whale Watching trip.
I plan to continue taking these trips, at least until I do actually get pictures of a Horned Puffin, and I hope next year to get back on the migration trip to see what we can find.
