Readers’ wildlife photos

We’re running low on photos, folks, and I know some of you out there are hoarding them.  Send ’em in, please!

Today we have some boids (and one fish and one mammal) from reader Susan Harrison, an ecologist at UC Davis who is having entirely too much fun. Susan’s IDs and captions are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.

Albatrosses and more

Pelagic seabirds are those that forage across the oceans and seldom either stand or sit still, approach the shore, or even flap their wings.  Albatrosses, to take one of the most spectacular examples, soar hundreds of miles a day with barely a wingbeat. Petrels, Storm-petrels, Jaegers and Shearwaters are similarly long-winged wanderers of the wide blue spaces.  To see these birds, one takes a boat trip to a productive marine area such as the upwelling zones just off the California Coast.  It helps if there are experts on the boat, for ‘pelagics’ are often seen from far away and don’t sport many colors beyond the black-gray-brown-white range.  And it also helps to be seasickness-resistant, which I’m not.

Nonetheless, in August 2025 I joined a trip with Noyo Pelagics out of Fort Bragg, California headed for the underwater Noyo Canyon six miles offshore.  Our boat, the fifty-foot Kraken, was absolutely loaded with seabird experts.  So loaded, in fact, that I had to pick one spot to stand for most of the ten-hour trip. Luckily, my spot was clinging to the stern rail right between “the guy who wrote The Book” and who was generous in helping novices, and the deckhand who was tossing chum overboard to attract birds.  The stern rail was also the right place for me for other reasons, but enough said.

It was a sunny and windy day with six- to 12-foot swells most of the time.  My success in even raising my camera to my face was relatively low.  If it’s any consolation, the handful of species I managed to photograph gives a fairly full sense of the range of phenotypic variation.

We were delighted to see a couple of Laysan Albatross (Phoebastria immutabilis), which nest on tropical Pacific islands and wander across the entire Pacific to feed.

Laysan Albatross: [JAC: Note that the oldest known wild bird is a Laysan Albatross named “Wisdom”, who is 73 or 74 years old, breeds on Midway Atoll, and has had about three dozen chicks.]

Another source of excitement was a South Polar Skua (Stercorarius maccormicki), which breed in Antarctica further south than almost any other bird, and range across all of the world’s oceans. They are known for a bad habit of eating penguin chicks. They love their own kids, though, so if you approach their nests (according to ornithologists) “They will pound on you. They will hit you right in the face.”

South Polar Skua:

A fun non-bird sighting was an Ocean Sunfish (Mola mola), one of the world’s largest fishes, reaching 250- 1,000 kg.  The common English name refers to its habit of sunbathing at the surface, but other names allude to its weird shape:  “moon fish” in many European languages, “swimming head” or “only head” in German and Polish, “lump fish” in the Nordic languages, and best of all “toppled wheel fish” in Chinese. The Latin epithet mola means “millstone”.  It’s in the order Tetraodontiformes along with pufferfish, porcupinefish, and filefish, which all have beaks formed from four fused teeth.

Ocean Sunfish:

We saw a Hawaiian Petrel (Pterodroma sandwichensis), a Manx Shearwater (Puffinus puffinus), Ashy Storm-Petrels (Hydrobates homochroa), and multiple other Petrels, Jaegers, and Shearwaters, but I was unable to take decent photos of them.  Toward midafternoon we entered calmer conditions where I took many photos of Black-footed Albatrosses (Phoebastria nigripes).  These delightful, ravenous piscivores with their permanent smiles are long-lived (60 years), monogamous, and famous for elaborate mating dances.  They are “tubenosed” seabirds, with nasal labyrinths allowing them to scent seafood from enormous distances, and with special glands above the eyes for excreting salt.  Most endearingly, they run awkwardly on the water to take off and land, and seem to love riding the waves.

Black-footed Albatrosses going for the chum:

Black-footed Albatrosses running on the water:

Black-footed Albatrosses surfing:

Black-footed Albatrosses at rest:

California Sea Lions (Zalophus californianus) on buoys were a welcome sign that the harbor was just ahead: