Westport, WA 9/24 - 9/29, Part 2

     On Monday morning we woke up in Westport with a wonderful view of the Pacific Ocean outside our apartment window.  The ocean however was angry, quite the opposite of its name.  It was understandable why the pelagic was postponed.  Westport is a small fishing community, much like Hatteras, NC where we also travel to for pelagic trips.  The local marina was filled with fishing boats, all idle waiting for the sea to settle down.  The boats should have been out catching salmon, cod, shrimp, dungeness crabs and the like.  We did not see the first boat head out of the harbor until Thursday.

After a few hours of morning birding from the nearby jetty along the southern side of the inlet, we had to decide about extending our stay to the end of the week.  The captain of the pelagic boat said that conditions looked good for Friday, and the three of us would give him enough participants to sail.  So after a few searches on the internet and a few calls to the airline, we had a place to stay for Thursday and Friday, and a flight home on Saturday.  I of course checked with my wife first, and she encouraged me to stay and enjoy it, assuring me all would be good at home.  We would liked to have ventured to the Cascades or Olympic National Park for other northwestern specialties, but agreed that should be a separate trip specifically for them.  We spent Monday through Thursday sea watching and visiting some local hotspots.

Monday’s birding yielded me three more life birds:  pigeon guillemot, Steller’s jay and glaucous-winged gull.  It was a good thing we picked up the guillemot while sea watching at the inlet as we would not see one out on the boat.  We picked up the first Stellar’s jay at a nearby spot known as Bottle Beach.  We would see or hear a few more over the next few days.  Later, we found our first glaucous-winged  gull in a parking lot at a marina in Tokeland.  Identifying gulls out west could be challenging since hybridization between species is much more common than in the east.  Lucky for us, Jason has a fascination for gulls and is more an expert on them than anyone I know.

Left, Steller's jay.  Right, pigeon guillemot.  © S. Weiss

We did not find any new birds until Wednesday, which turned out to be another good day for scanning the inlet from the Westport jetty.  We found our first marbled murrelet, fork-tailed storm-petrel and a yellow-billed loon.  We picked up the storm-petrel foraging in the inlet and had eyes on it for a few minutes.  This was trumped when Jason spotted an interesting loon out in the middle of the inlet.  There had been reports of a yellow-billed loon in the area before we arrived in town.  Jason, whose patience is greater than mine, had been checking every loon hoping to find the rarest of them all (only common, red-throated and Pacific until then).  I could hear his breath shortening when he saw a loon with a large pale bill pointing upwards.  He saw it in his scope and had Chris and I take turns checking it.  Chris was able to get some documentation photographs to confirm it was indeed a yellow-billed loon.  That scope was the best thing any of us brought along on the trip, maybe besides our rain gear.

On Thursday we ventured a little further away from Westport, hitting a couple hotspots that our friend Scott suggested.  We did not add any new life birds, missing the sharp-tailed sandpiper that also had been seen before our arrival.  We each had seen a Pacific golden plover back in NJ, but couldn’t find one where they should be expected.  We had many western specialty birds during the week that were not life birds for some of us.  Western, California and Heerman’s gulls were plentiful.  Western grebes, along with pelagic and Brandt’s cormorants were common around the jetties and harbors.  We couldn’t find Jason a surfbird, but we did have several black turnstones and some wardering tattlers.  Brewers blackbirds were common, especially around parking lots.  Western versions of dark-eyed junco (Oregon subspecies) and northern flicker (red-shafted) made our lists.  A bar-tailed godwit was seen along with hundreds, maybe close to a thousand, marbled godwits.  Bushtits, Anna’s hummingbird, Townsend’s warbler, Hutton’s vireo, Bewick’s wren and black phoebe rounded out the western species for the week.

Left, northern flicker (red-shafted) at Tokeland, WA.  Right, northern flicker (yellow-shafted) at Island Beach State Park, NJ.  © S. Weiss

Left, Heerman's gull.  Right, bushtit.  © S. Weiss

Thursday ended up encouraging, we saw several grey whales surfacing across the inlet from our lookout spot along the jetty.  The ocean had calmed down considerably since we first arrived.  Several boats from the local fleet had returned to work out at sea.  We were finally going to get out on the Pacific ourselves.

During the occasional breaks in the rain, we were treated to spectacular rainbows.  © S. Weiss