Mammals:

• harbour seal: 110
• elephant seal: 1 mature female

Birds:

• gulls: 673
• cormorant: 28
• black oystercatcher: 14 (plus 3 chicks)
• pigeon guillemot: 15
• Canada goose: 2
• bald eagle: 1
• purple martin: 1
• great blue heron: 1

Wildlife seen this week inside the reserve but not observed today include: California sealion, Stellar sealion, Caspian tern, killdeer, harlequin duck, barn swallow. Again the pigeon guillemots, who were out all day, are greatly under represented (by a factor of 10).

Banana seals. Seems like a lot of effort to stay warm and dry and prolong the inevitable, if just for another 20 minutes.

Today there was some enticing food around and almost all the gulls not on a nest were out feeding along the shorelines and in small bays.  For this count I separated the gulls into those sitting on a nest (328), not on nest on but on Race Rocks (143) and on South Islands and Seal Rocks (202). I am sure I missed more than a few nests that were obscured by rocks.

I spent 3 hours in the lighthouse today. Marvelous day.  I didn’t understand why there was a paper towel roll on the stairs of the lighthouse until I found a frantic purple martin throwing itself against the windows. I opened the small door to the outer deck. It flew away in a hurry straight toward Sooke.  I also longingly watched a long debris chain drift west through Race Passage. Last night with the pike pole I pulled a small log to shore and put a line on it. It was hard to watch so much wood just pass up by.

Debris drifting past

Facility work

• cleaned solar panels
• weeding along walkway
• topped up battery fluids

Vessels

• Ecotourism: 12
• Private: 4

Weather

Clear skies. Light and variable winds during the day, westerlies 23 knots in the evening.  Daytime temperatures 11 to 19 degrees.

A beautiful center-cockpit yacht (maybe a Hallberg-Rassy) motoring past.