Date: 11/19/25 9:09 am From: Dennis Paulson via Tweeters <tweeters...> Subject: [Tweeters] Bonaparte's extravaganza
Hello, tweets.
Elaine Chuang, Netta Smith and I visited Blaine yesterday, and I saw something I have never seen before: a spectacular show by Bonaparte’s Gulls foraging over Drayton Harbor and Semiahmoo Bay. From the pier at Blaine we saw that the gulls extended in all directions, as far as we could see with binoculars and scope, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, surely a thousand or more. They flew rapidly over the water and dipped to the surface at intervals.
Apparently the reason for this was the presence of dense schools of many thousands of herrings. They were going by the pier in dense rivers, hundreds of individuals deep and wide, and extending that to the whole area where the gulls were foraging, there were surely many millions of them. We could only conclude that as the gulls were foraging in the same way everywhere, there must have been herrings everywhere.
There were other gulls, Horned Grebes, and cormorants also foraging in the same area, but nothing like the numbers of Bonaparte’s. They were roosting by the hundreds with shorebirds on the mudflats on the north side of the road out to the pier, presumably their bellies full of herrings.
The neatest thing was that there were herrings below us as we stood on the edge of the pier, and adult and the occasional immature Bonaparte's came in after them, dropping to the water also right below us. Most of them came up empty, but when a gull would catch a fish, it stopped on the surface to swallow it, and we could take photos. The photos showed the herring prey clearly, all the fish no larger than 2 inches in length. As Pacific Herring can reach a length of a foot or more, these were all quite young ones,
We also saw the same numbers from the end of Semiahmoo Spit, although the gulls weren’t as close there. And some Bonaparte’s were even at the south end of Drayton Harbor as we drove around to the spit. I don’t know how long this will continue, but anyone living in the area might want to head over there to experience this wonderful spectacle. It would be interesting to know how long it continues.
