Puffins!
Puget Sound Express is a company that does primarily whale watching outings out of Port Townsend, Port Angeles and Edmonds, but they also do bird tours. I took their Fall Migration tour last fall so I planned to do their Puffin cruise this summer.
I was not disappointed. It was a 45 minute trip out to the area around Smith Island, which is to the West of Whidby Island and south of Lopez Island. There’s a very large kelp bed there which is where they’ve been seeing the puffins fishing this year. I counted 12 Tufted Puffins myself; the boat staff says their high number so far is around 25. No Horned Puffins were seen, they are quite rare in this area but the staff said they’d been seeing a single bird on and off.
Taking photos on a boat is hard; my camera requires two hands, but I also want to support myself so I don’t get pitched over the railing, and of course, the boat is rocking and the birds are moving, so there’s a fair bit of praying and hoping going on, along with a lot of fuzzy images and very clear shots of empty water, but overall, I’m rather happy with the results. I noted a total of 17 species on the 3 hour trip. This area is home to the largest breeding population of Rhinoceros Auklets, and they were found in large numbers everywhere
I also got a few nice shots of another local breeding species, the Pigeon Guillemot
And in a real stroke of luck, we found, wrapped up in a strand of kelp and taking a nap, one of the local sea otters. They wrap in the kelp to rest to anchor themselves to the location so the tides and currents won’t move them away.
There were a few interesting finds among the birds — near Smith Island, on a huge driftwood snag floating in the water, was an immature Bald Eagle. What it was doing way out there we have no idea. we ran into a couple of large bait ball areas, with hundreds of Gulls and Auklets fishing, and in one, there was a single Pacific Loon — very later in the season for them here, they should be north breeding. A few Brown Pelicans were a nice find, as were 8 Harlequin Ducks. We also found a very early Hermann’s Gull — they summer in this area, but they typically arrive later than this.
PSE has been running these tours for over 30 years, and it’s a good boat and a great crew, so if you’re in the area, I highly recommend them. Out of Port Townsend, the bird trips run on their Red Head, a 40 seater that’s quite comfortable. Their whale watching is in a larger, 120 person boat and I plan on going on on that one of these days as well.
