Dermot Breen's Blog: Coral Princess 21st & 22nd December 2019

Saturday 15 February 2020

Coral Princess 21st & 22nd December 2019

Our second official day of the cruise was supposed to involve a shore day to Montevideo in Uruguay. However, this had to be cancelled early in the day as the sea conditions were far too rough to allow for disembarkment from the ship to the harbour via small passenger boats. I'm normally one of the first people to get seasick on boats but thankfully I didn't have this problem for (most of) the trip. The cruise ship was a huge vessel (fifteen floors) and had very good stabilisers which usually made for very smooth conditions. We were anchored off Montevideo for most of the morning, so we had no seabirds being so close to shore. We had a guide lined up to take us around some of the birding sites near Montevideo but this obviously didn't happen. Thankfully of the four shore-days during the course of the cruise this was probably the one we could most easily afford to lose. There would have been a very similar line-up of species that we had already encountered in Argentina. The same could not be said of the Falklands, Ushuaia and Punta Arenas stops.

We eventually started heading off south to what would be our next destination - the Falkland Islands on Christmas Eve in three days' time. Once we were about 60km offshore we began seeing our first proper seabird in the form of a giant petrel species. Given that this was our first proper day offshore we were still trialling out what position and floor on the boat were best suited for our purposes. We could access the bow of the ship on deck 10 but over the next few days we discovered that while some birds would come very close as they were crossing in front of the boat, time on the bird was very limited as they whizzed by. We spent most of the first day or two on either the port or starboard side quite high up on deck 14, depending on whatever side was most sheltered from the wind. You are obviously quite high up here, but it wasn't too bad. Birds rarely came too close to us and as a result I didn't happen to take any shots on the 21st with the Canon.

After a while the stern or back of the boat on deck 10 proved to be the most productive for us. We usually had the place to ourselves unlike the promenade on either side of the boat. We noticed that the wake of the boat would usually attract a few giant petrels most of the time and this would in turn draw in other tubenoses. Birds tended to stick around a bit longer behind the boat and would usually zigzag across the wake a few times until they realised that we weren't a larger commercial fishing boat and that there would be no discards for them.

We had met the only other serious birder on the boat the previous day a young American birder called Henry Griffin who was very keen with a very sharp pair of eyes who was excellent at picking stuff up with just the naked eye. Henry is one of the new generation of birders who forgoes binoculars and telescopes and just uses a digital camera. He documented each day of the cruise as we went along on his own blog which is well worth checking out. How he got time to download/edit photos and write up the day's events daily is beyond me. I was usually tried to be out on deck from 0600 - 1800 hrs with a breakfast and lunch breaks in there at some stage during the day and had little time for much else. https://worldbirding.travellerspoint.com/

One thing that would become apparent during the entire cruise was the differences in species make up from day to day. The giant petrel, Black-browed Albatross, Wilson's Petrel and Sooty Shearwater were standard enough throughout most of the trip but everything else seemed to vary day to day. To start off the trip on the first proper day Atlantic Yellow-nosed Albatross was the commonest albatross but after this we didn't see a single one for the rest of the trip. Interestingly also all of the Black-browed Albatross we had the first day were all very young birds. After this nearly all BBA's were adults with younger birds being very rare. Cape Verde Shearwaters were only encountered on the first day with a handful seen the next day, never to be recorded again. I think some of the other lads may have seen a few Cory's types, but I didn't pick up on any myself.
It took us a while to get to grips with the more difficult species groups such as the whole Royal/Wandering Albatross complex. The Royals became easy enough after a bit of experience but the Wandering Albatross complex remained confusing given the huge overlap with the currently four accepted species (IOC). The prions would also prove to be real head wreckers!

21st December 2019 tallies.