March 9, 2007
Yes, I'm sure but I still don't think I'll count them....
This has been an odd winter, at least odd when compared to the most recent 25-year average. We saw record rainfall in December and record cold, including about 8 inches of snow in January. This is not what we've come to expect from the normally temperate Oregon North Coast.
Ocean temperatures have also been (at least according to local surfers and the data buoy off the Columbia River) much colder than the 25-year average. Weather buoys north and south of the Columbia River buoy are off line, but the Scripp's Buoy at Gray's Harbor and temperature data from the Seaside Aquarium seem closer to normal and suggest that the cold water phenomenon at the Columbia River buoy may be localized.
Why should we care about all this water temperature data? Well, beginning in mid-February we started noticing an increase in deceased birds washing up on local beaches. Most were RHINOCEROS AUKLETS which routinely wreck in late winter along the coast, but among them was an increase in HORNED PUFFIN wash-ups. Rhino numbers peaked in late-February and at around the same time 2 MOTTLED PETRELS and 2 THICK-BILLED MURRES were found. Anytime you get a spike in weird species, the natural impulse is to look for correlations with other things going on in the ocean...thus, an interest in water temperatures.
Given that deep-pelagic species have been turning up dead on the beach and the ocean water temperatures have been running cold in the area, one might anticipate an increased likelihood that live deep sea species could be seen from shore. The circumstances seem proper
On March 6, amid a remarkable number of Rhinoceros Auklets at Silver Point, south of Cannon Beach, I saw a murre fly by which in the 10 seconds or so that I had it in my scope appeared to be a Thick-billed Murre.
While the bird was seen in good light and for a sufficient amount of time, it was 1/2 a kilometer away and moving.
The next day, I went to the North Jetty of the Columbia River and did a seawatch for about an hour. There were remarkable numbers of BLACK-LEGGED KITTIWAKES as well as Rhinoceros Auklets, Common Murres and other ocean species. I picked up a kittiwake in my scope which showed a uniformly dark mantle and dusky underwings, the field marks for a RED-LEGGED KITTIWAKE. I followed it for at least 15 seconds as it flew east along the South Jetty at least 3 km away.
In the space of 2 days I had seen two species that I have never seen before... alive.
But all ocean flyby ID's, particularly those made at some distance should, rightly, be met with some skepticism. There is plenty of room for error and no real mechanism for checking your work. Statisticians use what is referred to as the 95% certainty rule when evaluating whether an observation can be trusted with confidence. 95% is actually a pretty high bar, many of the choices we make every day are made from confidence levels that are arguably much lower, but 95% or better is a good place to keep your operational mindset when trying to identify things that have the potential to be of significant interest to others.
Unfortunately, there is no clean, mathematical way to calculate the confidence value for my two observations, so I'm stuck in the squishy, hard to explain world of "what would Darwin do?" that place in your heart where you make choices based on personal values rather than hard data....
So, after weighing the pluses and the minuses... conditions favorable for rare pelagics to occur, dead rare pelagics recently reported, multiple fieldmarks consistant with the ID vs. seen from a distance, single observer, no mechanism for replication, I can set the following confidence limits: I am confident enough of these observations to report them to a (presumably) interested birding community. I'm confident enough about these observations to send them off to the records committee and let them choose which records pile to file them in. If I had already seen a wild, living, breathing Thick-billed Murre or Red-legged Kittiwake, I'd probably count these as year-birds or even first State birds, but I am not confident enough in these observations to have them represent the first I've ever personally seen, alive and wild. I can't justify putting them on my lifelist.
I'm still young, I can wait for better data.
Posted by mbalame at March 9, 2007 7:47 PM