[obol] Horned Puffin

[Darrel Faxon]

   Obolites
        This afternoon at 5 p.m., I found a Horned Puffin in full breeding plumage in Yaquina Bay between the first rock finger and the bridge.  I went away to make some telephone calls, and by the time I returned at 5:40, the bird had moved, and was very close to the south jetty just beyond the third rock finger.  I watched for a while as it floated in the bay no more than forty feet away.  At about 6:05 Chuck Philo came.  By that time the bird was actively diving, but he still got good looks at it for a few minutes at distances of about one hundred feet.  It continued moving west with the outgoing tide, and we last saw it toward the middle of the channel as far west as the westermost rock finger.
    My wife Laura was with me when we first found it.  She had been saying for quite a while that she wanted to see a puffin, but I never dreamed the first one she would see would be a Horned Puffin at close range, inside the estuary.  I have been actively birding the outer coast for over thirty years, and this is only the second Horned Puffin I have seen, and the first ever inside the bay.
    We also saw what was almost certainly the white headed loon reported a few days ago from Yaquina Bay.  It is apparently a subadult Pacific Loon that did not quite make it to full adult plumage.  The head and neck are whitish, but not so strongly so as one would expect from a fully breeding plumaged individual, and the body is dark, lacking any white spotting.  There is also a smudge of blackish near the lores.  I have never before seen one in quite this plumage, but it certainly is a Pacific Loon.

Darrel
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