Scope sightings

A spate of bad weather, up to 7m swell and heavy winds, urged Shane (with me as a curious tag-along) onto the Seagull Nursery island with the scope to look for albatross that may have been blown closer to land by the bad weather. The walk to the island over the beach gap yielded a rare and exciting prize, a Paper Nautilus! It had washed ashore due to the heavy wave action and was found by two CapeNature rangers. We stopped and chatted, and took some photos and eyed the shell covetously! The octopus was almost dead and abandoned its shell (which is in perfect condition and now resides on my shelf!) and almost as soon as we moved away from it a Kelp Gull swooped down and gobbled it up in one go! Impressive! On the island we found a semi sheltered spot and Shane set up the scope while I wandered around and collected a few more pellets for my ever growing collection. We spent a pleasurable hour or two scanning the ocean for albatross, and spotted a good few Shy Albatross which came close enough to get a good look at, a scope is a marvellous thing! We decided to head back to the mainland as the weather was growing progressively worse, and the gap was on occasion covered by a particularly large wave, and so I walked back in slightly soggy takkies, ugh. But all in all an awesome trip, and a discovery that bird watching with a scope is really addictive!

Awesome Paper Nautilus!

As you can tell I was frozen!

Searching the sky and sea for albatross.