Seawatch - Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Thanks to southeasterly winds, today was an excellent day with over 26,000 birds!  The first hour was jam packed with over 5000 birds, including 2600 Red-throated Loons.  It was quite hectic, with flocks and streams of loons passing by, with gannets in the distant as well as mixed in with the loons, while flocks of scoters flew past faster than the loons and geese tried to sneak by in high flying flocks overhead.  Ring-billed Gulls also pushed through in some numbers, with nearly 200 in that first hour to make my job even harder.  

Red-throated Loons passed by in significant numbers, with 9681 today.  This is likely to be the season peak for loons, surpassing last year's peak flight of 7293.  Gannets are still a bit behind, with only 2470 today; we are still due for a bigger day, hopefully!  A nice late season push of 1128 Double-crested Cormorants was attempting to get our cormorant numbers up to a respectable number, as we are still way behind average for cormorants.  

Other notables include: the first push of Canada Geese (645), a nice push of teal (421), a diversity of dabblers including wigeon, shoveler, Mallard, black duck, pintail, and Wood Duck, and a remarkable 25 Common Eiders (this would be 20% of last year's total eiders!). 

Two notes:

1) We have almost set the season total record for Black Scoter!  We have 253,136 thus far and the best season ever had 256,633.  We only need 3498 more Black Scoters to set a new season record!

2) Thursday is forecasted to have more east winds switching to the south throughout the day.  I predict it will be another good day, potentially similar to today!

Check out the day's total here:

http://trektellen.org/count/view/1747/20171128