Wednesday, 14 October 2015

Seawatching on a whale tour from Sydney

This may not have been a pelagic, but for a birder on his first visit to the southern hemisphere it was still a great experience. While we were searching for the tell tale signs of whales, a casual remark by a crew member to say that he may have seen a blow just left of that albatross alerted me to the fact that my number 1 target species was nearby. I saw it immediately, a huge  bird with black upper wing and white body, clearly an albatross, but which species? I think that it is a black-browed albatross, but am open to suggestions.
There were hundreds of shearwaters around, and I managed to succesfully identify three species, wedge-tailed, short-tailed and fluttering. An unexpected bonus was two Australasian Gannets.


Black-browed albatross. I have seen one before, sitting on a cliff in amongst the Gannet colony on Unst, Shetland, but I didn't see that bird fly and I desperately wanted to see a "mollyhawk" in the southern oceans. Fantastic bird!



Look at those wings! Definitely made for gliding!



I think that the dark underwing makes this an immature bird and I think they more or less rule out every species except black-browed.


 Fluttering shearwater

Short-tailed shearwater

Wedge-tailed shearwater


Welcome swallow


1 comment:

  1. Hey Colin. Nice pics! Doesn't that albatross show yellow along the upper mandible, making it one of the yellow nosed types? Keep up the posts, even Jack is impresse!

    ReplyDelete

Popular Posts