Date: 7/13/26 11:57 pm From: Naresh Satyan via groups.io <naresh.satyan...> Subject: [LACoBirds] Pelagic birds around San Clemente Island July 11 2026
Hi all,
We had a private birding charter on Saturday July 11, aboard the 6-person zodiac Skimmer out of Newport Beach with Capt. Delaney. The route was Newport Harbor -> Lasuen Sea Mount -> The Slide -> Mackerel Bank -> north end of San Clemente Island -> offshore waters to the west and south of San Clemente Island -> south end of San Clemente Island -> back to Newport Harbor. We covered about 170 miles in total.
Trips on this boat require good weather conditions to go this far offshore, and after rescheduling a few times, we were able to go out because we had calm winds west of San Clemente Island and relatively light south winds inside the islands this weekend. The sea surface temperature was about 70 F over much of the area.
Bird numbers were somewhat low all day, with no large feeding aggregations anywhere, but there were a few highlights. Common birds like Western Gulls, Elegant Terns and Brown Pelicans were almost entirely absent, and we had small numbers of Pink-footed (156), Sooty (54) and Black-vented (13) Shearwaters. These numbers aren't too dissimilar from what we observed on a similar route in August 2025. Whale watching boats report that bait fish is absent in much of our area and marine mammals are pretty scarce.
Most of the bird highlights were in waters around the southern end of San Clemente Island: - We tallied a total of 16 Guadalupe Murrelets over the day. This included 4 families with young (2 adults with 1-2 chicks in a family group). - 6 Scripps's Murrelets around the island, also including a family group with two fuzzy chicks - 20 Craveri's Murrelets, all in pairs - Cook's Petrels were scarce, but we found three singletons around the island - 2 Black-footed Albatrosses - 65 Black Storm-Petrels and 3 Ashy Storm-Petrels
We did not have any migrant small terns, gulls or jaegers, and no other unexpected species.
The murrelet show was fantastic. We haven't been able to do this route in mid-July before, but our high count for Guadalupe Murrelet over the past few years has been "only" 5 birds each in 2024 and 2025 (mid-August both years). 16 Guadalupe Murrelets was exceptional! All family groups (both Scripps's and Guadalupe Murrelets) were vocal, and we attempted recordings of both adults and chicks calling at sea. We assumed at least some of these birds hatched on San Clemente Island based on how young they looked, but that is just guesswork.
Marine mammals were very scarce -- no baleen whales, and only very small pods of dolphins (<100 in each pod). We had a couple of elephant seals, and about 10 good-sized flying fish all over the route.
