A few interesting birds

I saw my first fulmar yesterday!

Actually, it probably wasn't my first. It was a northern fulmar, a bird that looks a lot like a herring gull, except for two key differences: a dark black eye, and a set of straw-like tubes that run about halfway down the beak. From a distance, it's easy to see them and think 'gull', especially when you're not too up on your seabirds, like I was the last time I spent any real time out of the harbor, so it's likely I have actually seen them before and never realized. But yesterday as we came on a mother/calf pair of humpbacks, I saw the fulmar sitting on the water about fifteen feet off our bow, looking back at us and paddling away furiously. I wasn't really expecting to see one, actually, because their peak period on Stellwagen Bank is January through April, and they tend to spend August further north than this.

The fulmars belong to an order of birds called the Procellariiformes. Their gull-like appearance is even more deceptive than it seems at first look: fulmars are actually a type of petrel, and probably more closely related to penguins than to gulls. Not all the Procellariiformes have this appearance, as the order also includes albatrosses, storm-petrels, and shearwaters. All these birds have elongated tubes that run from their nostrils down along their beak, which are most likely used to get rid of salt. These are animals that live almost their entire lives at sea, and take in a good amount of salt-water. I'm not sure if they can outright drink it (I know that many other non-fishy marine animals get all their freshwater from the food they eat), but they do have to deal with salt in one way or another.

I've also started seeing northern gannets, which are a huge bird (close to a three-foot wingspan) that dive-bombs fish from fifty feet above the water surface. I was talking with a passenger about birds the other day, looked out the window, and one was flying right along side us at probably 20 knots.

The weirdest bird I've seen out there was a red-breasted nuthatch. We were on whales a few days ago, and I was up in the wheelhouse talking about the animals when I saw a bit of movement about a foot from my head. I looked over and saw this tiny little bird, exhausted and gasping for breath, on the windowsill I was leaning out of. It is most definitely not a seabird, but it's not all that unusual to see little tree-birds blown out to sea -- I've seen small groups of them follow a boat for miles, steadily diminishing in number as the little things just run out of stamina, and dropping onto deck as soon as they can catch up. In one case back when I was interning, I saw a few warblers fly past me as soon as we slowed down for some whales, landing on benches and rails, and then felt the tiny weight of one that landed right on top of my head. This nuthatch probably saw us, the only solid ground within miles, and flew in the wheelhouse's window.

Once we returned to the harbor, we let it back out the same way it came in. After all, it didn't have a ticket.