I was on the Burrowing Owl night shift, so, after dinner, I headed outside as the others went to bed. It was a beautiful night, calm and clear, perfect for sneaking around with a telemetry antenna, chasing tagged owls into the wee hours. A late climb up Lighthouse Hill afforded a spectacular view of the nearly-full moon rising over downtown San Francisco. Visibility was crystal clear, so I set up a spotting scope in the dark and watched traffic lights changing 25 miles away, tiny pricks of green, yellow, and red lights. At 2am, it was weird to peer into such an utterly different world. I’m not sure where I’ll be next Thanksgiving, but I sure won’t forget this one.

We can see it from inside, so I checked every five minutes, shining a flashlight through the window glass after the sun went down, to see when it left its roost. The owl woke up around 5:15, spent a few minutes stretching and blinking, and left its branch at about 5:40. By 6:10, it had hit the mist net, and we were admiring it inside the banding lab!

I don’t think I’ve ever touched a fluffier ball of feathers. Partly by shining a blacklight on its feathers (new feathers glow a bright pink under UV), determined that it was a hatch-year bird; just a few months ago, this owl was just an egg in a tree cavity up north. It seems to have settled in now, and might stick around the whole winter. This morning it was back asleep outside our window, as usual.

Jim mentioned he’d heard a longspur fly over the terrace, so Erica and I headed out to look for it. It turned out to be a Smith’s Longspur: the first one ever recorded from the Farallones, the 8th record for California, and a life bird for everyone on the island! To cap things off, two Ancient Murrelets were sitting right by East Landing in th evening, calling back and forth to each other on the water. Pretty cool stuff.

Fresh water comes from collected rainwater, which is precious enough that I get one quick shower a week. Wednesdays are my shower day. At least it helps keep track of time, looking forward to my next shower; otherwise I’d have no reason to count off days. Every day on Southeast Farallon Island is equally full of the expected and unexpected.

Like this afternoon, when Liz found another (!) Summer Tanager lurking on Cormorant Blind Hill. That makes two in three days. Jim hadn’t seen one here in ten years of biologizing. Cool stuff. I was happy enough to be out of the rain for a bit; yesterday we got an inch and a half. At least it filled up the water tanks: showers in the bank!

Yesterday was a bit better. I unexpectedly caught a Burrowing Owl in a mist net, and Sara, a grad student studying the owls this winter, was pleased at the opportunity to fit it with a radio transmitter. Then Dan found a Grasshopper Sparrow skulking on the terrace, and we managed to herd it into another mist net (Oscar and I fought over who got to band it, and ended up splitting it up – he put the band on, I took the measurements). Overall, though, things are rapidly slowing down. Fall migration is mostly over, and Farallon winter looms ahead.

We’re not the only ones interested in the sharks. Commercial cage-diving boats from San Francisco anchor here almost every day (patrons pay $700 for their chance to face a Great White underwater) and there’s a Stanford shark research crew with a  swanky sailboat. We often call down shark attacks via marine radio, then watch the boats suddenly hustle toward the action (in return, they help ferry gear and people to the island). Yesterday I alerted the research crew to an attack in progress, and, after they’d hurried to film the action up close, they called back. “Hey, we picked this dead bird out of the water,” they said. “Looks like a whistling-duck. You want it?” A whistling-duck would be rare indeed, so a handoff was arranged; the boat eased up to North Landing just long enough to throw across the carcass. It turned out to be a White-fronted Goose (oh well). The waterlogged goose is now sitting on our front step, where a Western Gull with a broken wing is scavenging away, in between scarfing mouse-trapped mice I’ve been throwing out my second-story window.

It rained this morning, the first rain I’ve seen here. A few good birds are around: Chestnut-collared Longspur, Blackpoll Warbler, Palm Warbler. Dan is making friends with the ravens. Three weeks down, seven to go.

It’s been a varied week on the Farallones. Unfortunately, the “perfect” weather system never really materialized, so we didn’t get a big push of migrant birds. It’s still been pretty solid, considering: yesterday we banded a Yellow-bellied Flycatcher (about California’s 22nd record), and a Gray Catbird (the island’s 17th record) and a couple of Palm Warblers showed up.

Two days ago we were sitting inside the house when the whole island seemed to explode, shuddering and vibrating. The number seven jet from the Blue Angels, practicing for San Francisco’s Fleet Week, had strafed the island and flipped into a vertical ascent over the lighthouse, firing his afterburners. He did various acrobatics right overhead, some barrel rolls, smoke stuff, and extremely low passes over the rest of the afternoon. While entertaining, the stunts violated the no-fly airspace over the island (to protect the wildlife). The pilot was apparently contacted and “apologized profusely.”

And yesterday a coast guard helicopter briefly landed on our catchment pad, disgorging two young, dark, and tattooed guys who spent most of the day tinkering on top of the lighthouse (the light’s been broken for a year). Their helo subsequently left, broke down elsewhere, and the two guys had to go off on a shark-diving boat to get home.

Speaking of sharks, this morning we all lined up to watch a spectacular Great White attack in the bay right off our front steps. A dive boat and a research boat were both on the scene and radioed close-up details to us while we watched through scopes. The shark, a 16- or 17-footer named Tipfin, spent almost an hour tearing apart an Elephant Seal on the surface, with lots of thrashing and blood. Good stuff!

The last three days have been busy on Southeast Farallon Island! On October 1st, the weather suddenly changed, and birds have been raining from the sky ever since. We’ve been running to keep up with the migrant wave. What a change from last week!

In the last three days, 16 species of warblers arrived, including Magnolia, Blackburnian, Black-throated Blue, Palm, Tennessee, Canada, Chestnut-sided, American Redstart, and Ovenbird. We’ve also had a Bobolink, Clay-colored Sparrow, and, rarest of all, an Evening Grosbeak this morning (the last one occurred here in 1979). We banded most of these birds, and I got a chance to play with my new macro camera lens.

It’s pretty weird to see these birds picking around on rocky cliffs or crammed together in one of the three trees on the island. They often land first on the lighthouse, on its railings, or even clinging to its vertical cement walls. Overall, about 60 species arrived in this wave. Most of them will probably be gone tomorrow: the wind shifted back north this afternoon, the clouds blew out, and we’re forecast for two days of slow conditions before another front hits on Wednesday.

One side effect of having so few birds around is that the flies are getting out of control. Kelp flies creep into your eyes, ears, under clothing, and basically make life miserable whenever the wind falters. We need a few hundred hungry birds to eat all the flies on the island (apparently it’s happened before).

Yesterday morning a Great White Shark attacked a seal right in front of our house while we watched from the front steps; a huge fin sliced its way around the floating carcass just offshore for a few minutes, and the shark’s head broke the surface a couple times as it ate with gusto. It was my first white shark sighting, pretty cool. Perhaps even more notable, Oscar and I both beat Jim at ping pong after dinner – definitely a first!

Unfortunately, neither weather condition – sunshine or fog – is very good for birding. On clear days, birds stay on course and keep migrating without stopping on the island. In fog, they can’t find the island at all. And it doesn’t help that the wind has been whipping out of the north, winging migrants easily on their way south. We only had two new arrivals today: a pair of Mallards and a Least Flycatcher skulking in the fog. Pretty abysmal for the peak of migration on Southeast Farallon. We’re hoping for a change in weather.

The Farallones jut in a burst of granite about 20 miles from the Golden Gate Bridge. The islands, covering barely 60 acres, host the United States’ largest seabird and marine mammal colonies outside Alaska. But the seabirds nest in summer and mammals breed in winter, so the fall season here is focused on different phenomena: it’s the peak season for Great White Sharks, which are bigger and more numerous at the Farallones than anywhere else in the world; and fall brings migratory songbirds, with the chance to find unusual species rarely seen in North America.

The Farallones are a pretty weird place even without the sharks, seals, and birds. The islands, designated a National Wildlife Refuge and managed by Point Reyes Bird Observatory, are off-limits to the public; the airspace is a no-fly zone; boats aren’t allowed to approach closer than 300 feet. We get shipped food supplies once every two weeks via a network of volunteer sailboat owners from San Francisco. This fall’s crew is made of three other twenty-something bird interns, a grad student studying Burrowing Owls, and one supervising biologist from PRBO. There will be no days off. Looking forward to a great season!

First, my season working with Purple-crowned Fairy-Wrens has ended. After five months at Mornington Station, I’m now sitting in a hostel in Broome, on the northwest Australian coast. Michelle drove me out. The six-hour trip was uneventful, except for the two vehicles we passed going the other way (one was our handyman coming back from a town run) and a near-miss with a suicidal wallaby. I’ve seen my first paved road (though no traffic lights yet), slept in my first real bed, and used my credit card for the first time since early March. It’s definitely weird to see unfamiliar people everywhere after so long in such a tight field station. Sort of makes me miss the wilderness already… It’s hard to transition out of a place with so many great friends and memories.

Second, I’ve finished writing my first book! If I haven’t posted here in a while, it’s because my energy has been focused into the final draft of Among Penguins: A Bird Man in Antarctica. It’ll be out next spring, published by Oregon State University Press, with a color photo insert in the middle – the story of life in a penguin colony and the general craziness of Antarctica.

Third, I’ve been planning my next adventures. This fall, I’ve been hired to work on the Farallon Islands, a group of rocks off the coast of San Francisco, from September to December. The Farallones, remote enough that only biologists are allowed to land, are a migratory bird trap and the world’s densest Great White Shark concentration. I’ll be banding songbirds and watching for shark attacks while perched on a lighthouse and living on a 60-acre windswept rock with only two trees, hoping for rarities to drop from the sky. Should be good.

I’ve also decided to hike the entire 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail, from Mexico to Canada, next summer. More on that later.

More immediately, on August 15^th I’m going to run the Adelaide Marathon in southern Australia before flying home to the U.S. the same afternoon. Between now and then, I’ll spend about a week birding in southwest Australia. So lots to look forward to.

I will keep this blog updated as things progress. Internet access will be intermittent over the next couple weeks, but I’ll do my best! Cheers!