See Life Paulagics ran their annual pelagic Christmas Bird Count today, Jan. 2. The seas were a bit rough, keeping us within 10 miles of shore for the entire day, but the birding was still good.

Shortly after we left the inlet, we began seeing NORTHERN GANNETS.
While this bird is seen regularly from shore, we often get birds coming in much closer than they come to land when they investigate the chum. Some of the birds were close enough to see their pretty blue eyes.

As we proceeded, conditions got a bit more difficult. We started picking up scoters, mostly unidentified but also a few SURF and BLACK SCOTERS. Soon, we started finding RAZORBILLS, mostly in ones and twos but also one group of 6, accompanied by an adult BLACK-LEGGED KITTIWAKE. The sea conditions made it difficult to approach them. A group of 3 WHITE-WINGED SCOTER flew by to put that species on the board. An interesting find was an adult "NELSON'S" GULL, a Herring x Glaucous Gull hybrid.

We moved further inshore to calmer seas, picking off various birds including our only countable LESSER BLACK-BACKED GULL and our only GREAT CORMORANT for the day.

As the day progressed, the winds decreased and we headed back offshore a bit. Surprisingly, we had a DOVEKIE fly right up to the boat while
we were just 4 miles offshore, the closest I've ever had one to land.
As we moved offshore, we ran into more RAZORBILLS, giving people better looks, as well as another BLACK-LEGGED KITTIWAKE. We left those behind, only to run through a band of DOVEKIES, and we found another 14 of them. When we turned back towards shore to head for home, we started kicking up numbers of DOVEKIES. When all the counting was done, we had found 75 of them, my highest count that close to shore.

Full counts for the birds we found follow:

Brant - 12
Surf Scoter - 8
Black Scoter - 15
White-winged Scoter - 3
scoter sp. - 100
Long-tailed Duck - 84
Red-breasted Merganser - 3
Red-throated Loon - 22
Common Loon - 14
Northern Gannet - 115
Great Cormorant - 1
Bonaparte's Gull - 245
Ring-billed Gull - 1
Herring Gull - 200
GLAUCOUS x HERRING (Nelson's) GULL - 1 (adult)
LESSER BLACK-BACKED GULL - 1 (1 adult, plus 1 adult in Shark River)
Great black-backed Gull - 150
BLACK-LEGGED KITTIWAKE - 2
DOVEKIE - 75
RAZORBILL - 26
large alcid sp. - 5

Short-beaked Common Dolphin - 2
dolphin sp. - 10

Birding was generally decent, but without a doubt the DOVEKIES stole the show.