Weather Today: 

• Visibility 10 NM
• Sky overcast
• Wind 10-15 knots SW
• Calm seas earlier in the day, rougher later on – swells 1-2m high

Visitors and traffic: 

• Some old equipment is being moved to land, so there have been a couple of runs back and forth to the college.
• The usual 5 or so whale watching vessels daily, very few pleasure craft as the weather gets worse.

Ecological Notes: 

• We have been seeing whales every day, both humpbacks and orcas!
• We thought the sea lions were beginning to move along for good but they came back – it has been interesting to observe how suddenly it can go from a couple hundred hauled out to perhaps only 50. They must leave in the night as we have yet to notice it as it happens.
• Unfortunately we have another sea lion hanging around that has plastic around its neck.
• While doing some work on the jetty today I (Kai) noticed an interesting pile of small stones piled up in a corner of the railing. We often see seagulls, especially the ones that look younger, playing with rocks of the same size. They are usually together in a group of 2-4 and they’ll take turns moving a rock around, holding it in their beak, and trying to take it away from each other. It seems plausible that the seagulls placed the rocks there, we haven’t seen other animals interacting with each other and objects this way.

Some photos from the last couple of days:

Census:

65 Harbour Seals

457 California Sea Lions

737 Cormorants

4 Eagles

17 Geese

4 Oyster Catchers

13 Black Turnstone

3 Humpback Whales

221 Seagulls

184 Stellar Sea Lions