A Whale and Bird Filled Weekend

Although the weather still won't quite commit to summer, the wildlife-watching has been fantastic on San Juan Island and is very much starting to reflect the changing seasons. The excitement for me this weekend started on Friday afternoon when the T101 group of transient orcas passed by Lime Kiln. While it's becoming more common to see transients from shore from San Juan, it's still not too common to see them this close off the west side!

Male transient orca T102 - born the same year as me!

The T101s are an impressive group because it's a female and her three adult sons. Often you'll only see one or maybe two males that stick together in one family unit. I hadn't personally seen these guys in 8 years, so it was neat to see them again!

T101A and T101B

J-Pod had been up north since they came through on Sunday May 7th, and it was very nice of them to wait until Saturday morning to come back south. It was also nice to get a break in the rainy morning weather to see them! They were very spread out both east-west and north-south across Haro Strait, so we only got good looks at about half of them from Lime Kiln, but we weren't complaining!

J16 Slick

The whales were "all mixed up" too, meaning they weren't in their family groups, so IDs were a little more challenging! The J16 family group was split up near the lead, in the middle, and at the end!

J36 Alki and her son J52 Sonic

We've had so much bird activity in the yard it's been possible to just hang out outside and turn up 20 species over the course of half an hour. One of the dramas that's been unfolding this spring is use of our nest boxes, including following a male house wren has he started building a nest alone, attracted a mate, and then defended his home from some violet-green swallows who were interested in taking over!

A male house wren begins to build a nest, persisting to place these seemingly too large twigs into the hole

The singing pays off! The male keeps close watch on a female as she adds softer materials to the nest he's started

Fight! The male wren defends the nest box against a pair of violet-green swallows that are interested in moving in

One reason I went outside Saturday evening was to check up on the wrens, as the nest box has seemed very quiet since the swallow incident, although we did see the wrens continuing to build up the nest later that day after the swallows had left. I'm hoping they've just gone more into stealth mode, perhaps as the female is incubating eggs, because we haven't noticed them entering or exiting the nest box in a few days, although we did hear the male signing yesterday.

While there wasn't much happening near the nest box (though I did observe a quiet chickadee enter to feed some begging chicks in the neighboring box), there were plenty of other birds to observe in the yard last night! Here are just a few of the things I saw:

Warbling vireo - new yard species and photo year bird #158

Bewick's wren singing his little heart out

Hairy woodpecker on the suet feeder

Rufous hummingbird on the lookout to defend "his" feeder

Yesterday afternoon J-Pod seemed indecisive about heading west, as we could still see them milling out near Discovery Island from Lime Kiln, but head west they finally did, so without any whales in the area this morning we again turned our attention to birds, and we found more than 35 species on a walk at Three Meadows Marsh. Included in the list were 4 more photo year birds, three of which I had been hearing in the last week or two but hadn't seen or had an opportunity to photograph.

Common yellowthroat - photo year bird #159

Yellow warbler - photo year bird #160

The other odd sight was this barn swallow that was trailing something behind it. At first I thought it was a plastic bag, but it seemed rather to be something fabric-like, with a string tied around the bird's tail or body. It seemed to be flying pretty well, though was laboring a bit more than the other birds. Hopefully it finds a way to free itself!

A Transient Day on the Explorer

On this foggy day reports were that all the Southern Residents were out west well out of our range, but late morning a boat picked up a group of transient (marine mammal feeding) orcas on the Canadian side of Haro Strait. Our Western Explorer trip was delayed a bit due to the fog, but once we got out there we met up with the group of about 10 transients a little ways south of D'Arcy Island in Canada.

I don't know what it has been this year, but I have had several encounters where a tight group of whales surfaces all together. I feel like that's something I didn't see much of last year, but it is so cool to see so many fins at the surface at the same time. These transients were relatively easy to track, since they were traveling in a straight line. They would all surface together several times, then dive for about seven minutes. Here's what it looked like when they were up:

The big male in the photo above is T102. He was there with his mother, T101, and her other offspring T101A and T101B. Also present were T90 and T90B, and part of the T124 family group.

Transients don't ever have what we call "open" saddle patches like some of the residents due, where there is black inside the saddle patch making it look like a check mark. Ts, as we call them, pretty much always have solid saddle patches, but what I noticed today is that a lot of them have black lines through the saddle. See the black line through the gray saddle patch on the whale below? I thought this would make it easy to identify, but I'm not sure which whale this is. Since we don't see transients all that often, my ability to ID them is not up to snuff.

Another difference between residents and transients is that transients tend to have much pointier dorsal fins. Look at how pointy the fin is on that female in the middle!

On the way back to Friday Harbor we swung past Spieden Island where we saw some harbor seals, Mouflon sheep, and this striking adult bald eagle. I love the composition with all those gray branches against the yellow hillside!