Pelagic trips are quickly becoming one of my favorite ways to spend a day birding. Maybe that will change when I get out in bad weather but so far I have had two trips on two unbelievable calm days, too calm in fact. Anyway, we left the harbour shortly after 7:00 and headed out to sea. Just a reminder for those who don't know what I am talking about, a pelagic trip is essentially a boat trip to the open ocean, preferablly to the deep water past the continental shelf, in order to see oothe birds of the open ocean such as albatrosses, shearwaters, petrels, and others. Unless one has the chance to visit the islands where these birds breed, most of which are very remote, these boat trips are the only way to see them.
The trip I was on in August was mostly about albatrosses, but now most of the albatrosses have returned to their breeding grounds in the Southern Ocean so I didn't expect to see the large numbers of albatrosses this trip. Instead, trips in teh spring and summer are all about shearwaters and petrels. These aren't quite as majestic and awe inspiring as the albatrosses but are still quite interesting birds. They spend their entire lives at sea, only returning to land to nest. During our trip, the most abundant species was the Wedge-tailed Shearwater which nests on some islands just outside the harbour, but we did see a number of other species as well including Short-tailed, Flesh-footed, Sooty, Hutton's, and Fluttering Shearwaters.
All of these birds were new to me so I was quite pleased but we were also hoping for a variety of petrels and for that we were quite dissapointed. The only petrel we did see was the Great-winged Petrel and at one point we had fouro birds around the boat. Again, this was a new bird for me so I wasn't too dissapointed but the calm seas and light winds were a dissapointment for many since high winds make the birds more mobile. All in all, it was quite a pleasant trip and I was able to add a half dozen or so new birds to my lifelist as well as get photos of a handful of more birds.
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