[texbirds] S Padre Island Texas Pelagic Sept 20th preview of Trip WOW!
- From: Gary Hodne <garyhodne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Texbirds <texbirds@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 20 Sep 2014 23:03:13 -0500
Hi texbirders and Pelagic Fanatics,
Everything just seemed to come together today to make today's Texas Pelagic one
of the best in a long time! The weather was pretty nice with 2-3 ft seas,
scattered showers on the way out, nice high clouds following that keeping the
heat down for the morning. We reached the shelf edge in very good time keeping
to a strict east heading.
It wasn't until 9:10 am that we had our first bird a cooperative Audubon's
Shearwater. Things were slow for another hour until a lone Bridled Tern was
spotted right before our first group of Sperm Whales was spotted a couple
hundred yards out. By now we were in very deep water 2000-3,500 ft . After that
first group of 3-4 sperms sank into the depths before we could get close a huge
pod of what turned out to be Melon-headed Whales made their way to our boat and
encircled it for 15 -20 minutes. Conservatively we estimated 200+ whales
surrounding the boat within feet of us. It was one of the greatest wildlife
spectacles we've ever seen. Over the next 2 hours it seemed like non-stop
action. A couple Band-rumped Storm Petrels passed close by the bow. Then a
distant huge splash was seen off the bow. As we watched in amazement we had 4
or 5 huge Sperm Whales breach in rapid succession. No one aboard had ever seen
this before. As we cruised toward them a second closer pod of 6 sperms surfaced
just in front of the boat, very close. Two large bulls sounded showing off
their flukes. Then the mothers and children approached the boat giving us
superb views of the calves and their blunt noses. There was even a few more
whales from a third group blowing behind us. By now we had seen somewhere
around 15-18 Sperm whales. In 4 different pods!
For the remainder of the day a great assortment of seabirds and land birds was
seen which I'll elaborate more on later as it's getting late and it's been a
long day. We had 5 Masked Boobies, 3 Pomarine Jaegers, 1 parasitic, 3+ Bridled
Terns, 4 Magnificent Frigatebirds, 2-3 Cory's Shearwaters, warblers, swallows,
flycatchers, sora, cattle egret.
To be continued
Gary Hodne
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