Off the Dock: Harbor Seals

I've successfully gotten a few more video clips this week of those harbor seals that have been hanging around our marina - here are the results:

Underwater Video - First Takes

Winters on San Juan Island are very different from summers: the days are short, the weather is wet and gray, and the town is quiet. People get through the winter in different ways, but there are lots of different community activities to help pass the long, dark nights. Sports are my personal favorite. In years past I've played hockey and done rollerblading at open skate, and this year I've tried badminton and indoor soccer as well. This week I ended up doing all four, resulting in various types of soreness as I use muscles that have laid dormant all summer. I thought it was amusing, however, that the thing I was most sore from this week wasn't a sport at all - it was crouching on the dock taking underwater video clips.

I got a Flip video camera for my birthday, along with an underwater case. This is the perfect time of year to put it to good use because the marina is just full of schooling fish, and as a result, lots of other wildlife. We've had groups of seals coming through several times a day, plus different types of gulls and other marine birds, river otters, and the regular assortment of intertidal life.

I still have a long ways to go in getting the types of clips I think might be possible from right off our dock (including getting the camera lined up right in the casing), but here are a few samples from my first week or so of attempts. Featured here are a dock shrimp, a couple schools of fish, a cross jellyfish, a very brief look at a seal (they're proving the hardest so far!), and a Bonaparte's gull:

Cooper's Hawk

Another very cool bird sighting from the houseboat - this time it was a Cooper's hawk! At first it was hidden deep within the bushes. It was clearly looking for something as it would occasionally dive down to the ground. It's amazing they don't get hurt or at least damage their feathers flying through all those brambles.

Then it flew out into the open, making for this impressive view:

Not surprisingly, there was no bird activity at our feeders that afternoon! I've wondered a couple times in the past upon finding lots of feathers on the deck if a sharp-shinned or Cooper's hawk might have nailed something at our feeder, but this is the first time I've seen one of these hawks in the vicinity. It's a little sad to think about some of our cute juncos and sparrows getting pegged by this guy, but it's also pretty cool to have gotten such a close up look at this predator.

Bonaparte's Gulls

The first fall I spent on the houseboat in 2007 I had an amazing encounter with Bonaparte's gulls right off my front porch in September. A couple of photos can be seen here. At the time, I thought maybe it would be a regular occurrence, but I hadn't seen it again until this week. Three Bonaparte's gulls - one adult and two immatures - spent some time flying around the marina and foraging on bait fish. There were a lot of fish around, attracting not only the Bonaparte's gulls but also harbor seals, a belted kingfisher, a mew gull, and a couple of glaucous-winged gulls. 

Bonaparte's gulls are probably my favorite gull species to watch. They look so tiny, just half the size of our most common glaucous-winged gull, and appear very buoyant in flight. Sometimes during the spring and fall migration I've encountered flocks of hundreds or even thousands of them, an impressive sight, particularly when they're actively foraging. It was just as neat, however, to have a close up look at these three gulls this week, again right off my front porch.

One fun aspect of photographing wildlife in action is you get to pick up certain things off still photographs that happen to fast to witness when watching live action. For instance, I was surprised at just how far underwater these gulls went when diving for fish - they're not considered diving birds, but they almost completely disappear under the surface! Just part of one wing is visible here, on the left in the middle of the splash:

November is probably about the latest in the year I've seen Bonaparte's gull in the San Juans. It was very cool, and now that I know these close encounters at the marina don't happen all that often, I was especially excited by it!

Day of the Dead ~ 2nd Annual Tribute

Last year on November 2nd, the Day of the Dead, I wrote a blog post honoring the Southern Resident Killer Whales that we had lost during the preceding year. I'd like to make this an annual tradition, so here's my second annual Dia de Los Muertos tribute.

J1 Ruffles, estimated birth year 1950

I've already written extensively about Ruffles in a blog post that you can read here, and also honored him with a photo gallery that you can see here. It's still hard to believe that this iconic whale is no longer with us. Seeing J-Pod this year just wasn't the same without the distinct, wavy fin of Ruffles, probably one of if not the most photographed Southern Resident whale. Because of the ease of identifying him, he was especially popular with tourists, many of whom would come back after years of being away and ask about Ruffles. He was also known among local naturalists as "the man", in part because he was the oldest male (by far) in the Southern Resident community. His reputation for being a ladies' man (ladies' whale?) was substantiated by recent genetic research that showed him to be the father of quite a few young whales in the community.

L7 Canuck, estimated birth year 1961

When I think of Canuck, an L-Pod whale, the first thing I think of is how she often traveling with J-Pod. For several years in a row it seemed that she, along with her daughter L53 Lulu and adult male L57 Faith, would spend the winters with their closest relatives in L-Pod but spend the summers traveling with J-Pod. In the last couple of years this pod switching and fragmenting has become more common, but at the time it was especially notable for females to be traveling with a different pod. Canuck seemed to have a strong affiliation with both J1 Ruffles and J2 Granny in J-Pod, so perhaps in the absence of strong connections with other whales in her own pod, she and her daughter spent more time with these elder Js.

Canuck and Lulu were inseparable, and from 1987 onwards made up the extent of their immediate living matriline.  Canuck only ever had one other known calf that didn't survive its first year of life, though its possible she had other offspring before the whales were studied in detail starting in 1976. Despite their very small family, it seems Canuck and Lulu found somewhat of a surrogate family member in Faith, who was the only living member of his own matriline since his mother L45 Asterix passed away in 1995. Faith seemed to enjoy traveling with the eligible J-Pod bachelorettes, but perhaps he found the mother figure he was lacking in Canuck. Often, adult males don't live too long after their own mother passes away unless they latch on to another older female to help fill that role.

In the Center for Whale Research's genealogy guide, they have L43 Jellyroll as a possible sister to Canuck. Jellyroll, who died in 2006, has two living offspring in L72 Racer and L95 Nigel, who would be Canuck's niece and nephew. It's funny, when I think back on my whale encounters, I wouldn't have said Canuck spent much time with them, but when I look through my notes I find otherwise. I list them as either traveling with or near the L43s quite often when the rest of L-Pod is present.

Regardless of which pod Canuck was traveling with, she was always an easy whale to pick out from a crowd because of her distinct notch about a third of the way down her dorsal fin. From my perspective, that made it easier for me to follow her movements and social associations over the years, because she could be easily identified on sight as well as in photos, and even in poor lighting where her saddle patch wasn't visible. It will be interesting to see how Lulu does in the coming years without her mother, and whether she continues the relationship with the J-Pod whales her mother began or goes back to spending more time with her extended L-Pod family.

It is sad to lose these two whales, but others have been born and have started their own journeys as Southern Resident Killer Whales. This year we welcomed K44, a son born to first-time mom K27 Deadhead; L117, born at the end of 2010 to L54 Ino; and L118 born to L55 Nugget.

Orcas Island Birthday Weekend ~ Part 2

We stayed at The Cabin on Spring Bay, and spent the afternoon Saturday hiking the trails on the property or enjoying the views out the front windows. Here's a picture I took from the water's edge looking back towards the cabin:

The property sits between two ridges, and the trail we took started by climbing up one of the ridges and looking over towards Obstruction Island:

There seems to be more deer on Orcas Island than on San Juan. On Saturday we counted more than 30 for the day! Many of those were at Spring Bay.

Not all the mule deer on Orcas Island look like our San Juan deer, either - numerous animals are speckled with varying amounts of white. I assumed that maybe this was from in-breeding, although I questioned my own theory since I know deer do swim between the islands, which should help diversify the gene pool. After doing a little research, it sounds like the story is that at some point there were one or several pure white deer introduced or otherwise brought to the island. These cross-bred with the native mule deer, creating these variable color morphs. Doesn't this deer also look a little small (young) for this time of year?

There were so many deer around, it seemed like anywhere you looked, you could find one if you looked hard enough.

Back to our hike around Spring Bay.....it was one of those great walks where there's lots of everything to look at. Mushrooms:

Mammals - this is a native Douglas squirrel, much nicer than the large non-native fox squirrels that are most common around Portland. We don't have squirrels on San Juan Island! (Okay, there is a small population of flying squirrels on San Juan, but I've never seen one.)

And birds - the highlight was this barred owl:

We talked to the owner and he said he's only seen maybe three barred owls in the 20 years he's lived there. Nice find! Some other highlights included a pileated woodpecker, and the horned grebes and hooded mergansers that spent a lot of time in the bay itself. Overall, we saw close to 30 species from or around the cabin.

The Saturday evening sunset was pretty stunning:

Right before we left to have a delicious celebratory birthday dinner at the New Leaf Cafe in Eastsound, the moon became visible, too.

Overall it was a fantastic weekend!

Orcas Island Birthday Weekend ~ Part 1

Yesterday (Sunday) was my birthday, and this year I got an extended celebration with a weekend trip to a nearby Orcas Island. When we got on the ferry on Friday afternoon it was pouring rain, and I figured that at least we had a nice cabin to stay in and watch the showers if that's what the weekend had in store. By the time we pulled in to the Orcas ferry landing, however, it had slowed to a drizzle, and by the time we drove to Cascade Lake the rain had stopped altogether. We decided to hike the 2.7 mile trail around the lake, and the weather mostly held off. There were still lots of low-lying clouds hanging in the trees around the lake, making for some especially scenic (and iconic Pacific Northwest) views.

There were lots of Pacifc wrens, golden-crowned kinglets, dark-eyed junocs, and chestnut-backed chickadees in the woods. We even saw a bald eagle fly out of the forest, but the lake itself was pretty empty until we came to this bridge that separated the main part of the lake from a smaller offshoot. In this more protected cove we saw a flock of about twenty ring-necked ducks, four hooded mergansers, and three pied-billed grebes. Nearby were also some bufflehead and double-crested cormorants.

As we neared the end of the hike, we noticed it was getting lighter. As the sun was getting lower in the sky, it started to shine through a break in the clouds, changing the scene from the foggy one above to the bright one below:

The reflections in the water were really amazing: the near-perfect mirror image of the scenery was only disturbed the water droplets falling from the branches, creating a ripple effect across the surface. Once we got back to the car, the late afternoon light was especially stunning.

We got to our cabin just before sunset proper, and settled in for a nice evening including a spaghetti dinner, a fire in the wood stove, and a dip in the outdoor hot tub where the only sound you could hear was the gentle waves crashing on the nearby shoreline.

Despite a forecast for rain, I was thrilled when we woke up the next morning and the clouds started to clear shortly after sunrise. After going out for a nice breakfast, we made our way up Mt. Constitution, the highest point in the San Juan Islands at about 2,400 feet. There were still some clouds up there, and the summit was actually above the clouds, which again made for some interesting, ever-changing views.

Even up here the sun was starting to work its way through the clouds:

There wasn't a lot of bird activity up here. We heard a common raven, a flock of red crossbills flew by a couple of times, and we heard and saw several Pacific wrens. The wrens sure seem to be around in great numbers right now! They're one tiny forest dweller.

After our excursion to Mt. Constitution we decided to spend the rest of the day at the cabin. There were some hiking trails on the property there and a great view out the front windows into a secluded bay. Next up - some wildlife and scenic highlights from around the cabin!