Whale watches are usually about the whales.  Last Monday, they were more about other things:

Some of these photos were taken from a boat.  Others were taken at the shoreline:

There are complications that occur when you can no longer see clearly when your eyes are irritated.  Most of this boat ride involved double vision and a lot of annoyance on the part of my eyes.  I anticipated this.  After two days finding myself having problems with the wind at the beach, I knew the boat ride would be complicated.

So loaded up with eye drops, we went on the boat, and it actually turned out okay– I kept one eye closed most of the ride, which was easier than I thought it would be (it’s amazing how quickly you can get used to this sort of thing) and relied primarily on my right eye to track birds and do photography.  It seems to have worked.

I only ever see Bonaparte’s Gulls in the Spring and fall.  This photo, by the way, was taken from a moving boat:

As was this photo of a Northern Gannet:

One thing I’ve learned from some of my limitations over the summer is not to be afraid of playing with camera settings.  I decided I would try maxing my camera out for shutter speed to improve chances at getting good photos from a moving boat.  Most of these were shot in the 1/2000s to 1/4000s range, making for some very nice crisp clear shots, even though I had to sacrifice some quality of photo (I shot a lot of them at ISO 800, which tends to be a bit grainy, but it kind of made it easier to get photos such as these red-necked phalaropes, which were crazy difficult to get given how bouncy the boat was at the moment:

It’s also one of the reasons this Parasitic Jaeger is a little out of focus:

By sacrificing depth of field for shutter speed, not everything worked perfectly, but it paid off for shots like this:

It also paid off for shots of these Greater Shearwaters.  Even with the poor quality of the middle one (not sure what went wrong there, need to work on figuring that out), I was able to capture the freeze frame of the two birds fighting over a piece of meat quite well.  Also, a quick anatomical note– notice the bill on this Greater Shearwater?  It’s got a feature which is common to pelagic (ocean-dwelling) birds.  It’s a tube on the beak which helps it filter saltwater.  I rarely get photos where that particular organ is clearly visible, so I like this first one a bit:

It also gave me some great opportunities to get this Cory’s Shearwater, a bird I’ve only ever seen once before (you’ll notice that the beak on this one is a bit lighter than on the greater– that’s the best way to ID them):

And these Wilson’s Storm-Petrels came out nicely as well:

(Since storm-petrels are about the size of large swallows, I’m always glad to get photos of them that look even remotely clear)

Earlier in the weekend, I got this photo of a Black Skimmer.  It’s only the 2nd time I’ve ever photographed one (the first year was about the same time of year last year)

Around the same spot, I had good looks at common terns:

I also saw, for the first time, Forster’s Terns that morning, but got some really nice looks at them from the boat (once again, that super-high shutter speed paid off):

And a few others– I think two of these are common Terns, but the tail is do deeply forked in one that I suspect it’s something else:

Oh, and did I say something about whales?  We only saw two whales.  One was a Minke, which I didn’t photograph, and one was this Fin Whale:

Not as exciting as Humpbacks, but still nice.