Great San Juan Island Bird Tour - Bellingham
Hancock here: Great 7-hour bird tour that revealed both the normal local breeding Tufted Puffin and the largely Alaskan breeding Horned Puffin. After a wonderful boat ride to Smith Island, about 2 hours out, we not just saw about a dozen of the 34 nesting Tufted puffins the Island hosts, but we had one Horned Puffin spend about 40 minutes beside the boat - showing off to an appreciative boat of birders.
It was a wonderful day - super boat, two decks, wonderful viewing, fine drinks and a super salmon wrap for lunch. The boat could hold 100 but only about 50 on board.
See Delta's Freddie Whiting's web posting of the trip:
https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipN ... hNSjFpMXdB
This is the San Juan Tours out of Bellingham.
Unexpectedly there were two adult eagles on Cone Island beside their empty nest and one other adult feeding on a cormorant rock. Hundreds of harbour seals, Steller Sea Lions and we saw a pair of Harbour Porpoise and a Minke Whale entertained us for about 15 minutes by feeding beside the boat.
I had a nice discussion with the local Tour Guide - hoping she might change her dialog about the eagle’s local demise being due to pesticides when it was the local shooting of the Washington eagles, rewarded by the Alaskan bounty, that killed off all the coastal eagles of WA and even the Fraser Delta. Ours have now recovered from the 1964 total of 3 nests to over 750 for the valley.
Our eagles are now almost totally gone on migration from the valley, and we are about to erect this season's new nests and clean some CAMS. This year we are off to California and Texas to oversee the installation of bald eagle nests in America. For any locals, I will be talking to the Delta Naturalist on Sept 3, 7 PM, at 4755 Arthur Drive, Delta.
Wait until our book comes out this spring about "Why & How to Build Bald Eagle Nests" - I suspect we might start a competition of "Who can build the finest eagle nest in America"?
Stay healthy and good bird-watching,
David
David Hancock
Hancock Wildlife Foundation
19313 Zero Avenue, Surrey BC Canada V3Z 9R9
Phone: 604 761-1025
email: [email protected]
"Home of Live Streaming Web Cams"
See LIVE: www.hancockwildlife.org