[All photographs copyright, Gary Nunn 2014] – Not more than five minutes down the road from me, so I jumped in the car and went to take a look at a reported Ancient Murrelet Synthliboramphus antiquus on Mission Bay. Originally found by Lesley Handa, and subsequently confirmed from Lesley’s photographs by Phil Unitt, the murrelet was still around at about 12 noon today when several of us collected at the original sighting location on Vacation Isle East. It had continued swimming southwards along the shore of Vacation Isle and was at the southeast corner around the large public boat ramp. I thought it looked pretty healthy all things considered, and it was actively hunting small prey items around the perimeter of Mission Bay as we watched it. An unusual sighting for sure here in Mission Bay although this species has made some famous extreme vagrancy travels. Back in 1990 I saw one in England on a little island called Lundy!
Ancient Murrelet – Mission Bay, San Diego County, California 20 Oct 2014
Ancient Murrelet – Mission Bay, San Diego County, California 20 Oct 2014
Ancient Murrelet – Mission Bay, San Diego County, California 20 Oct 2014
Ancient Murrelet – Mission Bay, San Diego County, California 20 Oct 2014
Ancient Murrelet – Mission Bay, San Diego County, California 20 Oct 2014
Two Virginia birders will be vacationing in SD Thanksgiving week. Other than your blog (excellent pictures!) is there another web resource for finding SD birds? Thanks
Hi Paul, you can also browse the listserv group https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/SanDiegoRegionBirding/info
And there is a link at the bottom of this page to a site guide, look under Resources, here http://www.sandiegofieldornithologists.org
Gary.