Serendipity and Rare Birds

A story by Debi Shearwater.

DEBI SHEARWATER is the founder, owner and operator of Shearwater Journeys. She takes people from all over the world on trips out on Monterey Bay to see birds and other marine life. Debi has taught bird watchers that if whales are feeding, birds are probably near by, and it’s worth looking at everything that is out there. Her trips include Half Moon Bay and the Farallon Islands off San Francisco Bay, but over the years she’s led trips all up and down the California coast. She also leads expedition voyages at sea, including the Galapagos, Antarctica, South Georgia, the Falklands, Svalbard and the Russian far east.

Debi says she’s witnessed the comeback of the great whales in Monterey Bay since the ‘70s, but is now seeing the same thing happening off the coast of Russia in the Western Pacific, where she’s seen blue whales, fin whales, humpbacks, minkes, grays and even a North Pacific right whale.

Debi was born and grew up in Brookhaven, Pennsylvania and left when she was eighteen, because she married an Army Officer. She and her husband lived in quite a number of places, mostly in the south, including Alabama, Georgia, Virginia and Texas. Then he got orders to come to the Navel Post Graduate School in Monterey. Debi came kicking and screaming all the way, as she did not want to come to California: too many people and too many cars!

Debi’s path into bird watching was fortuitous. While her husband was in Vietnam, her little brother found a baby bird. Not only did it not die, but Debi raised it and the female house sparrow became her pet bird. Debi’s husband sent her a pair of binoculars from Vietnam, and she began to look at the birds in her backyard.

Debi then bought the book How to Watch Birds by Roger Barton. In it he suggested joining the Audubon Society. At the time, Debi was still in Pennsylvania, but soon moved to Fort Hood in Texas. She didn’t know anyone in the small town they lived in, so she got a Roger Tory Peterson Field Guide for Texas, but couldn’t figure the birds out on her own. She decided to join the Audubon Society, but the nearest branch was 70 miles away in Austin.

Debi managed to join one of their field trips, and was mesmerized by the twelve bird watchers, all looking through their binoculars. There she met her birding mentor who told her about a woman named Connie Hagar, who lived in Rockport, Texas. Connie walked the same route every day and found all kinds of birds that people knew nothing about. It planted a seed in Debi’s mind and she thought, someday she’d find her own place and walk the same route over and over and over.

After Texas, but before Monterey, Debi and her husband moved to Virginia. The field guide for the area was full of shearwaters, and Debi decided she needed to see some. She went on her first pelagic trip while on the east coast. There she met a birder who lived in Monterey. She told him how disappointed she was in having to move to Monterey, and he told her if she liked sea birds, she’d love it.

Debi recounts that when you’re in the military you generally know you’ll be somewhere for a set amount of time.  She and her husband came to Monterey and were only going to be there for 18 months. The plan was to see everything they could see and do everything they could do in those 18 months.

Debi was now a birdwatcher so she went out on a National Audubon bird trip on the Bay and was hooked. It was 1976. The Monterey harbor was covered with fulmars, which sold her. Only later did she learn how rare that was. On her second trip that Fall, she hoped to see a whale. There was little written about them back then, and, low, they saw a blue whale!

Debi then organized her own trip with the Santa Cruz Bird Club charging $13 for a 7 1/2 hour trip. On her first outing they saw a special Japanese shearwater, the streaked shearwater, and that bird triggered her to start leading regular bird trips. However, she says the birds wouldn’t have sustained her; it was the marine mammals.

About then in 1977, she decided that maybe Monterey wasn’t so bad after all.  But her job as a military wife was to support her husband, which wasn’t what she had in mind, so she got divorced.

Debi then began putting together more and more trips. She ran eight the first year, and her top year she ran 80 trips.

According to Debi, the mid-1980s were like heaven on earth out in Monterey Bay. Twenty blue whales stationed themselves in the Bay in 1985. They were out there feeding, but hung around so long, folks began to think maybe it was their breeding grounds as well. There were also lots of humpbacks, and they also regularly saw leatherback turtles.

There were no whale watch boats back then, just Debi’s bird and marine mammal trips. She recalls that she was the first to see Cuvier’s beaked whales, and first to see killer whales making a gray whale kill. Many birders on her trips would get pissed, as Debi insisted on staying with the whales, but there was a method to her madness. They saw a lot of firsts, birds as well as whales. Like Connie Hagar, Debi’s been traveling the Bay over and over and making new discoveries along the way.

SERENDIPITY AND RARE BIRDS

So I got to Monterey. I did these boat trips, a couple boat trips. I thought it was a lot of fun. I started talking to local people, and I’m like, “How do you get to see a Laysan albatross? I’ve seen these black-footed albatrosses.” And they said do a winter trip. But, nobody does winter trips. There’s nothing out there in the winter. Well, I’m gonna do a winter trip.

So, I set up a winter trip, a February trip. I believe it was 1978, on the Star of Monterey, which was a new boat in Monterey at that time. With David Lemon. Big D. So we’re gonna go out there in February. I’ve got all these bird watchers in 1978 that come up from LA to go on this boat with me.  I’m advertising and we’re gonna go way out there and try to get a Laysan albatross.

Now in those days, you have to understand, it was not easy to see a Laysan albatross. Why? Because the Laysans breed on the leeward chain of the Hawaiian Islands, Midway and stuff, and basically they shoot towards the Aleutian Islands for feeding, whereas the black foots come to us in Monterey.

Now we see Laysans more often, but that’s because around 1985 Laysan albatrosses began nesting on islands off of Mexico. But in 1978 we didn’t even have those Mexican Laysan albatrosses.

So we go offshore, we’re looking, you know. I don’t remember the beginning of the day. There wasn’t much to it. Hard core birders! Hard core birders! And David and I, we spot these blows. And they’re going like this – angling forward. Wow, well! I don’t know anything about whales still, but I brought this NOAA publication, 444, which has black and white photos of all these dead whales, and that’s how I learned whales! And according to that thing, if the blow is going like this forward, that’s gonna be a sperm whale. And I’ve never seen a sperm whale!! Gotta see a sperm whale!! You gotta have that!

And David was into it as much as I was. So we spot these things, and we think they’ve got to be sperm whales. He says, “do you wanna go for em?” “Yeah, go for em!” Of course, they dive. Well, you know, if they’re sperm whales, it’s gonna be a long wait. So I’m thinking, “This is gonna be dicey. The bird watchers are not gonna like this,” so, I stop the boat and I tell them, “We’re gonna wait for these sperm whales to come up.”

It’s quiet on the boat. Very quiet. So, there’s this young lady on board. She is not a bird watcher; she’s the girlfriend of a bird watcher. And so everyone starts breaking out their lunches. The gulls that have been following us all day chumming behind the boat, they sit down on the water. And this young lady says, “You know there’s a funny looking gull back there. Laysan albatross was sitting on the water behind the boat!

Everyone absolutely went berserk! And I said, you know, I know you guys are probably all cursing me under your breath, because I stopped to wait for these whales, so let’s see in a show of hands, how many people is this a life bird for? Virtually everyone on the whole boat. That was a Laysan albatross. Just like that, while we were watching for sperm whales.

So it’s that combination of, you know, this idea, you know, then it began to sink into me, that man you better be looking at everything, You better be looking for everything, because one thing leads to another. And it just always seems to work that way.

And then there’s one other story. So, I thought, you know, I asked, “How do you see a Laysan albatross?” Go on a winter trip. Do a winter trip. So I thought well every winter trip was gonna be like that. Nope, nada. (laughter) It doesn’t work that way.

Well, I did have another idea. You know, like my most wanted bird for a long, long time was the tropicbird. How do you get to see a tropicbird? You gotta go out in the summer time, July. Nobody goes out in the summer time. Nobody does that. It’s not a good time of year. Well, I’m gonna go out. You gotta go way offshore. Well, I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna go out, and I’m gonna go out and I’m gonna go to the Guide Seamount on this little boat called the Silver Prince, a little tiny thing owned by some guy in the Navy school.

So, we get on the boat. Ron Ranson’s with me, and we go out. I mean, we left in the dark cause it’s a long drive out to the Guide Seamount. Very long drive from Monterey.

And we get way out there in the middle of nowhere. We’re chumming. And the captain has to take a leak, so he’s going down to the head, and as the boat was stopped, hovering over the boat is a red-billed tropicbird. Just like that! I thought OK, you do a summer trip and you get to see a red-billed tropicbird. It’s gonna happen every summer. Nope.

So in the beginning, you know, I have this idea, the way it was going, I thought it was magic. I thought it was magic!! You just do it, and the birds will be there! (laughter) It’ll happen!

You know, we had an albacore trip one time. We started doing these albacore trips. You’d catch an albacore. That’s a heck of a lot of fun. Oh my gosh, FISH ON!! There’s nothing like yelling FISH ON! I love it! And so we’re catching these albacore and having lots of fun. Saury are jumping right here! All the terns are trying to feed on the little baitfish that the saury are chasing. The Jaegers are coming down on top of the terns. You have a whole ecosystem laid out there right in front of you.

Underneath you’ve got all the animals that are trying to eat the saury, in addition to the albacore. So you’ve got the fish, you’ve got the birds, you’ve got, you know probably sea lions, all kinds of, you know, other things.

So you know it’s one of those typical foggy, overcast days and we’re out there, and now my “I want to see list is really ratcheting up.” Now I want to see a red-tailed tropicbird, not a red-billed tropicbird, a red-tailed tropicbird. All the red-tailed tropicbird sightings for California are 200 or more miles offshore. We’ll we’re not gonna make it two hundred miles in one day. No, not even close. And there’s only two or three records on top of that.

So we’re out there on this albacore trip and it’s an overcast day, real foggy, and you know, when you’re bird watching out there on the ocean you’re either looking like this (away) or you’re looking over the top of the water, and in the fog we get a fall out, in the fall season, of a lot of warblers that get lost, and stuff like that. So we had this warbler coming behind the boat, and we’re all looking up, and into our field of view flies the red-tailed tropicbird. If we hadn’t looked up we would of never seen it. (laughter) There’s a lot of serendipity out there, that’s all I can say.