What feeds each one of these creatures? Anchovies. There are swarms of them in the harbor and in the anchorage. Especially last week. In the calm water of the mornings, we could hear the flick flick flick of anchovies hitting the bottom of the top of the water. It makes concentric circles just like a raindrop would, and sounds exactly like a gentle drizzle. The sea lions, which don't seem to sleep all at the same time based on their 24 hour a day barking and moaning, make a quick "pff" as they come up for air under and around Skagua. They are hunting the anchovies. When we hear a long slow"pfffffff" we know it's a humpback outside instead of the lions. That's when I scurry up the stairs and call Eila out of bed, "There's whales, there's whales!" The whales are doing the same thing as the sea lions. Slowly, they trace the path of a slow sine wave...gulping on their way up to the top of the water, "pffffffff" at the top, then descending down, then upward for another scoop of wriggling silvery breakfast. They track back and forth across the anchorage . I wonder how many thousands of tiny fish they scoop with one bite.
Then this week, the sooty shearwaters , which follow the anchovies all around the edge of the Pacific Ocean were the ones to wow us. They come in towards land around 5 or 6pm when the winds shift with the lowering sun. These identical looking charcoal grey chubby bodied birds with narrow wings, swoop and swirl in quarter mile wide swarms. Sometimes swinging low, sometimes a narrow stream and sometimes a thick flapping river of wings. These birds do not ever seem to play. They are either circling, ready to bed down on the water to sleep, sprinting along in their flow, or quickly plunging to grab an anchovy, bobbing back up and taking off again immediately to join their purposeful companions. Like a million-strong game of follow the leader, in one year, shearwaters race from New Zealand, either up the coast of Japan, OR across to Alaska, down to California, then southwest again to New Zealand to nest and start the process up again. Here's a map https://teara.govt.nz/en/map/5484/new-zealand-sooty-shearwater-migration of their tracked flight patterns
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