Our wildlife viewing began just a minute after we left the dock. Hundreds of birds and a dozen California sea lions, our feathered and flippered friends. We saw brown pelicans, snowy egrets, great egrets, Brandt’s cormorants, western gulls, Heermann’s gulls, and a great blue heron. Many of the birds were resting and maybe 25% of them were staring below through the slats to the live bait fish, kept in netted pens below. Now and then a quick jab and the bird is successful in having a sardine meal. Red-necked phalaropes were seen a couple of miles out of the Channel entrance. These are technically shorebirds that spin in circles at the surface and stab tiny copepods and other zooplankton, such as krill, for a meal.
Bottlenose dolphins were found offshore in about 1,100’ of water. We enjoyed their power, strength, graceful movements and curious nature. Captain Bryan found us a Minke whale. It cooperated and seemed intrepid, surfacing many times every 90-seconds or so. A bit unpredictable in where it would show up, but it stayed within a couple hundred meters while feeding, likely on zooplankton deeper down, as we did not see any seabird activity at the surface. Further offshore, over the 9 Mile Bank, another pod of bottlenose dolphins, about 60, with a couple of nursery pods of mothers with babies, known as cow-calf pairs. A couple of bulls were showing off with ritualized courtship displays, high arching porpoises out of the water and bursts of speed unrelated to hunting or foraging.
On our afternoon trip, we were blessed with several pods of common dolphins, including a megapod of the breaching short-beaked common dolphins. It was an incredible spectacle, as we could see dolphins covering an area about a kilometer long by 300 meters wide. We saw a massive Mola mola or ocean sunfish, several kelp rafts with resting terns and gulls and a rarely seen Masked booby, a massive black and white seabird with a yellow bill and striking eye. Our sunset trip will be heading out shortly. Come on out and see the summer spectacle of diverse marine wildlife! – Naturalist Greg
