Sea Watch Friday, October 30, 2009

Today started out as though it could have developed into the big day with huge flocks of cormorants flying by in the first hour and a seemingly good diversity of other birds moving through, but alas it turned out to be another day at Avalon Sea Watch with the total number of birds at 11,629.

We set new day highs for Red-breasted Mergansers (RBME) and White-winged Scoters (WWSC) with 29 RBME and 43 WWSC. And today we continue to smash past Brown Pelican records with yet another additional sighting today for a total of 626. We are now also starting to get Scaup in greater numbers with 18 Greater Scaup and 4 Lesser Scaup seen today (14 of the Greater with 4 of the Lesser in a flock with a Common Eider).

And for a few disappointed visitors wanting to see a Parasitic Jaegar, I saw 5 in the last 2 and 1/2 hours of the day. Josh, you missed yours by less than 15 minutes, and it was a pretty good look.

Here is a list of birds seen today.

Brant (Atlantic) 20
Wood Duck 4
American Wigeon 4
American Black Duck 1
Green-winged Teal 312
Greater Scaup 18
Lesser Scaup 8
Scaup sp. 1
Common Eider 5
Surf Scoter 1952
White-winged Scoter 43
Black Scoter 1449
dark-winged scoter 17
Red-breasted Merganser 29
Red-throated Loon 109
Common Loon 21
Northern Gannet 3080
Brown Pelican 1
Double-crested Cormorant 3868
Great Cormorant 2
American Oystercatcher 9
Laughing Gull 330
Herring Gull 32
Great Black-backed Gull 66
Ring-billed Gull 65
Forster's Tern 68
Royal Tern 68
Parasitic Jaegar 5

And one last note that I forgot to mention last post, as of yesterday we broke 300,000 birds we have thus far counted migrating south this season.

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