Natural Selection

I didn’t blog yesterday as I only saw three birds – a brief shearwater and a couple of Leach’s Petrels. There’s only so much you can say about that really. You have your pre-conceived ideas of large sea birds arcing over the deep ocean, and eventually you dig out two birds barely bigger than sparrows fluttering in circles. It’s not an original thought to say that it’s amazing these small birds survive in such a challenging environment, but it’s still true.

Today was a fair bit better. There weren’t many more birds really. Of six birds seen five were petrels, including some Leach’s but also including some others. If other sounds a bit of a cop-out, then firstly we are as stated talking about very small birds viewed from the eighth floor of a ferry and secondly more or less identical species nest in the same places at different times of year. I won’t go into detail on that here, but for example see Grant’s Storm Petrel and Monteiro’s Storm Petrel.

The best thing about today is that it wasn’t just birds. First up were a pod of Short-finned Pilot Whales that headed east past us on our westward journey. The picture above is taken by me and is of Pilot Whales, but I’ve cheated and used one from a Marinelife survey I did in Biscay in January 2018.

We also had a few flying fish close to the boat. This was pleasing as Jane had never seen them before and was keen to do so. Finally after I had done my allotted seawatching and was on the treadmill in the gym I saw a turtle before it headed back into the depths.

Tomorrow is set fair apparently so even if it’s hard work at times there will hopefully be some marine life to report back on. There’s a hurricane to the south of Bermuda, the Captain thinks it could be an issue later in the week but more likely not on current weather charts. It might become a bumpy ride!