Weather:

• Visibility 15+ NM
• Sky mostly clear, overcast in late afternoon
• Wind 0-10 knots N
• Sea state: calm, glassy!

Visitors: A small number of pleasure crafts trickling through. Only a handful of tourism vessels over the weekend and a few through the late week.

Ecological Notes: 

• This week has brought some of our favorite visitors to Race Rocks: elephant seals! We’ve been joined by two huge male elephants seals as well as two younger pups that look to be only a year or so old. Unfortunately we haven’t seen any tagged elephant seals yet so that’s all we know for now.
• We’ve still been spotted seagulls displaying odd behavior. We’ve noticed a total of 7 over the past month.
• Whale sightings have slowed down now, seemingly as the weather gets colder and salmon runs slow. We have still been seeing around one per day but the sightings are less consistent.
• Today we noticed a tiny sea lion pup nursing! We mostly only see male sea lions on race rocks, but recently we’ve been noticing very small sea lions arriving. It’s hard to tell the sex of sea lions from a distance so this was the first female we’ve identified in the crowd.
• The bald eagles have continued to visit to fish and hunt gulls in the early to late morning. They particularly like to sit under the tower containing camera 5, sometimes up to 10 at once! The color variation throughout their different life stages is particularly striking.

Census:

• 54 Harbour seals
• 177 Stellar sea lions
• 233 California sea lions
• 4 Elephant seals
• 275 Brandt’s + pelagic cormorants (too far away to distinguish)
• 6 Double-crested cormorants
• 5 Surfbirds
• 3 Dunlins
• 25 Black turnstones
• 12 Harlequin ducks
• 7 Bald eagles
• 290 Thayer’s gulls