Observations about birds and weather from Alvaro Jaramillo, a birding guide in California.
"As a pelagic tour operator I get to see firsthand what is going on here in the ocean off California. The northbound movements of birds, fish, and marine mammals has essentially been unprecedented in the last year and a half. Lots and lots of record happenings, and patterns that people in their lifetime have not seen.
"(An) incursion of Blue-footed Boobies to California and beyond happened in the fall of 2013. That was the first sign of weirdness from a Half Moon Bay, California, perspective. There were a few BF Boobies in 2014, but definitely in 2014 the Brown Booby was the prevalent one; it was not odd to see multiples on a single trip.
"Here in the SF Bay Area spring winds have started in earnest, the upwelling is churning and the temperatures are dropping to near normal levels now on the ocean. Salmon are being caught, and things look normal for the time being, although this appears to be on the surface.
"A press release from the Farallon Islands last week noting essentially no breeding by various seabirds thus far, (and) failures by sea lions suggest that we are far from being out of the woods on the warm water. My guess is that come the summer when the winds decrease we will be back to more warm water, probably another round of Craveri's Murrelets going north, Black Storm-Petrel may once again be the common species here instead of Ashy...we shall see."
Wherever we look. It's changing.
