A slightly more sensible approach to pelagic birding

 Some people enjoy going out to the Continental Shelf and beyond to record pelagic bird species.  I have done this once and reckon that the second time would be my fault.  This epic may be of assistance in understanding why.

It is much better to find a good solid spot on the coast and let the birds come to you  It would help if you had the ability to identify the birds while they were cavorting around the horizon (or a good part of the way thereto) but I am usually able to find a few. My usual spot is called either Fisherman's Point (according to some VicParks signs) or Geology Point (a road sign, presumably put up by the Shire).

This image shows the location and the field of view (about 210 degrees I think).

I'm not sure how far it is to the horizon but the sea at the base of Gabo Island is easily visible to the North East and that is approximately 16 km away.  The BoM weather station immediately inland from the point is 22m above sea level so I suspect where I stand is about 18m above the waves.

Where this becomes interesting is trying to estimate how far away the birds are.  It is all quite basic geometry.  Assuming the horizon is 16km away (ie Gabo) then the telescope is angled down by about 0.06 degrees to have the horizon in the centre of the image.  Angling the telescope down by 0.5 degrees means the item in the centre of the image is about 2km away. My suspicion is that most of the time I have the telescope between those angles.

Another way of looking at this is the next image with the yellow icon positioned 16 km away and the red one 2km away.  It looks as though one could spit 2 kms!  

Where this comes to is to reinforce my surprise that when one lifts one's eyes from the telescope what seemed reasonably close through the telescope is either invisible or at best a mere white speck.

To business.  The signs were propitious when I arrived: was there a pot of pelagics at the end of the rainbow?  Or, channelling Judy Garland, was I about to get a farmhouse dumped on my head?

Mummy Rock was getting a good washing from the large swells.

There were a lot of albatrosses around.  As far as I could tell they were nearly all Shy Albatross - grey rather than black upperwing and an even, narrow, dark border on the underwing.  Following the discussion above I suspect most of them were around 2 km out to sea.

Although the wind wasn't too bad it was enough to catch my phone and make it vibrate sufficiently to reduce most images to garbage.  Knowing what I was looking at enabled me to work out there are 4 albatross in this image.

It was enthralling to watch the birds soaring around.  I eventually saw one with a much darker upper wing and a somewhat wider and uneven dark band on the underwing.  I'm reasonably confident that was a Black-browed Albatross.  A small flock of Black-faced Cormorants were swimming around in the area the Abatrosses were focussed on and a few Gannets were in the area.