Pelagic Birding

Ever since reading Mark Obmascik's The Big Year, I have wanted to "get my pelagic birds." That's a section of my Sibley's guide that I have studied and perused--filled with birds I had never seen.

Obmascik wrote of a sea birding trip off the coast of Cape Hatteras, which immediately went onto my bucket list. At long last, I can take it off my list.

The day began at 5:00 am when Carrie and I boarded the Stormy Petrel II--a sixty one foot working boat with a pair of diesel engines. It was operated by the folks at https://patteson.com/.

In the pre-dawn light we watched bottle-nosed dolphins feed as we wended our way through a dredge cut path through shallows toward the sea. These are dangerous waters. Shifting sands, powerful tides and currents, and big winds greeted us as we motored headlong into the sea.

We roared along at 17 knots for two hours. Our target destination was the continental shelf: the eastern edge of North America. It's a place where the warm shallow waters of North Carolina meet the frigid up-swell of the Atlantic Ocean. All of which happens beneath the powerful gulf stream.

It would take a life time to learn these waters. Swells go in one direction, though the wind is going in another. It's the graveyard of the Atlantic. Pirate country. And it is the sea sickness capital of North America.

I got excited by the sighting of my first storm petrel--a small black bird vanishing in the chops of a high black sea. Next came an Audubon Shearwater. As a trickle of seabirds turned into flocks on the horizon, I realized we were entering another realm. The shelf break teems with life. Flying fish, sharks, sea turtles, dolphins, jaegers, skuas--hundreds of birds in every direction.

Many of these pelagic birds are merely passing through. They nest in Antarctica, and head to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland for summer. They don't bother with land. That's just city traffic and housecats.

This tour was run by the folks at Seabirding--three radio equipped expert guides with a bird crazy captain at the helm. They were top flight. The leader of the group appears to be Kate Sutherland--she's the one that shot the photo above: a Wilson's Storm Petrel standing on a wave as it picks carrion and fish from the surface. She also blogged about the day in a piece she called Change is Good.

I picked up fifteen new birds for my life list, including a first summer arctic tern. It was an astonishing 12 hours on the water.

We returned sun burnt, exhausted and amazed. It felt good to take an item off the bucket list. And it is always good to see new birds. But neither of those feelings matched how honored we were to have had a privileged peek into the life filled realm of the continental shelf...