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.

How grotty is the weather?

 The early morning of 8 June 2022 seems to be fairly ordinary in terms of weather.  As I type it is 7.1C with a 10kph wind and 6.6mm of rain having fallen since midnight.  This has led me to search out a past blogpost in which I set out some criteria for unpleasant weather.  They were, for hourly records:

• Temperature <10C; and
• Wind - presumably gust - >20kph; and 
• Rain >1mm.

I have applied those criteria to my weather station records for June to date.  4 hourly periods (to 0600 on 8 June) satisfy them: 2100hrs on 7 June and 0000, 0100 and 0200 on 8 June.  So yes, Virginia: the weather on this day is grotty.  Looking back to the original post there were only 5 days in the period February 2019 to August 2021 with more than 3 grotty days. 

I have now examined the full period of my WS records.  This set of 4 grotty hours are the first which have met the criteria since August 2019.  Hola, La Nina!  The weather forecast, and the series of shower cells in the SW wind stream  shown on the radar as heading towards Mallacoota, suggests there is scope for further additions to the score in the near future!

Evening skies

 As usual we spent the period from 5pm to 6 pm sitting on a lounge looking out over Bottom Lake.  A large cumulonimbus looked as thought it might generate a shower somewhere - but not here.

Another darker cloud came from the West, with a fringe of virga.  Mount Waalimma is in the background, still lit by a low sun.

A few more little puffs of cloud - possibly cumulus, must reread "The Cloud Watchers Handbook".

More serious virga, although it might actually touch the ground.

The sunset colours up with ghosts in the window, if not the machine.

A slightly later image from my seat.

A walk up the Narrows

 This was done as something nice to do on a sunny afternoon.  Perhaps we might see a Bassian Thrush?  ... extended pause for laughter ....

We started by seeing this nice sailing boat peacefully entering Bottom Lake.

Our turn point was where the track goes uphill on heading up Captains Creek (2.76km from the start.)  We came back about 10m and found this colony of orchids.  ID is to be confirmed.  Pterostylis sp.

A Lewin's Honeyeater posed nicely.  We ended with 21 species of birds: not too bad for early afternoon in Winter with very dense vegetation.

Birds (mainly) away and home

The photos do get a little better later in the post!

The wind has been a little strong recently so there have been hopes of pelagic birds being blown in to the close in parts of the coast.  So I took my telescope to what I call Fisherman's Point (which is also what it is called on some Parks signs - the Shire sign off Betka Rd is Geology Point).  I set up my telescope with phone attached in camera mode.

The attempts at seabird photography were not great.  This reflects several things:

• the wind causing the setup to vibrate somewhat;
• the birds tending to be moving at fair velocity; and
• the birds being a long way out - while they seemed quite close in the scope when  looked with a naked eye, if I could see them at all they appeared to be halfway to the horizon (perhaps 2-3 km away).

This is definitely a Gannet!

I think this is another Gannet: unfortunately no-one has yet written a Field Guide to Birds Back Ends.

When I got home I found a message from a visitor saying that they had recorded several species of pelagic bird from Bastion Point.  So the next day (2 June) I took myself off there.  It was fairly quiet, with only a pair of Shy Albatrosses (I can't resist calling them Shy Albos) out to sea.  Then I looked at the rocks to find a bunch of black and white Cormorants.  In typically cooperative bird fashion they mostly had their heads hidden.

Then heads began to appear and they were revealed as Black-faced Cormorants.

Aquatic mammals were represented by a school of Bottle-nosed Dolphins.

Looking closely I think there are 7 dolphins in this image

The amount of white water being thrown over the rocks on Gabo suggests it wouldn't be a pleasant day on the water.

Now getting to some home birds.  A Restless Flycatcher decided to perch on various things when not extracting food from cobwebs.

Red-browed Finches took some water ...

.. as well as gathering food from the mown lawn  Note also 1 House Sparrow.

A New Holland Honeyeater perched in the wattle above the bird bath.

... before jumping in.

The Satin Bowerbirds continue to be interested in fallen petals from a Camellia.  They seem to eat them rather than take them to decorate a bower (although this one doesn't look to be in the bower-building demographic).

May 2022 Weather Report

After last month's attempt to use Google Docs for the weather report I have reverted to sanity (or as close to it as I can get) and am basing this report around Blogger.

The outlook improved dramatically on 21 May.😁  The weather hasn't been bad since then either!  After several months of well above median rainfall May was quite dry.  The temperature anomaly ended up just in negative territory after a fairly variable month.  Despite the lack of rain, humidity was very high, as possibly indicated by very calm winds.

Rainfall

What is this thing called rainfall?  We managed 29mm in the month.  While this is the lowest since December 2019 there have been a few months in between close to 30mm, so not totally strange.  It is well below median (39.9% thereof) and the fall in May 2021.

The daily rainfall at my WS shows there to only have been 2 days with significant falls but quite a few days with around 0.2 mm (ie morning condensation).

As a result of this poor fall the pro rata estimate of annual rainfall has taken a large dive from 2168 mm on May 1 to 1765 mm on May 31.

Temperatures

The difference between the average temperature for May as a whole and the long term average temperature for the month (aka the anomaly) ended up just negative at -0.14 C.  This is the end result of a roller-coaster with a cool start followed by a warm middle period and a cold end to the month.

The next two images show daily extreme temperatures, firstly from BoM and 

.. secondly as recorded at my Weather station.

Minimum temperatures

When compiling the anomaly (see above) this was the first month for some time that a major explanatory factor was not above average minima. We had 19 days with below average minimums and only 12 (fortunately adding to 31) days with below average minimums.  As a couple of the minima were well above (in the range 4.7 to 6.7 degrees) average the overall outcome for these BoM based data is a minimum 0.3C above mean.  
For my weather station the outcome was closer to the long-term mean - only 0.02 C above.  My comparative chart shows the minimum above both 2021 and the average for the month.

Taking a medium term view, since January 2020 (29 months) this is only the 5th monthly mean minimum below the long term average minimum for the month.  I hope you can work that out!

Maximum Temperatures

For the BoM series the average maximum is 0.2 C below the long-term average while my WS is 0.27 C above the average.  In other words, close to average.

Humidity

The chart of daily humidity shows a few dryer days in an overall pretty muggy month.  All humidity data is from my weather station.

That view is confirmed by the charts for the 2 standard times.

Wind

The daily run chart suggests that it was a fairly calm month (which could also be expected from the high humidity).

Indeed, looking at the longer term picture from my WS, the average run is well below average (66% of the 4 year average).