Hello birders:

(brown booby photo courtesy of Tom Blackman.)

We started our day at Santa Barbara Island observing a colony of brown boobies that have made the island their home and are nesting here. There was one Nazca booby there as well. We were able to get the boat in close to the island safely to get a great look at the birds on the rock.

We have travelled west most of the morning and crossed into the Santa Cruz basin and into deeper water. So far we have seen shearwaters, storm petrels, boobies, terns and jaegers. We’ve encountered 3 different groups of short-beaked common dolphins with boobies and shearwaters associated with them. We are headed northwest now in shallower water towards the Channel Islands.