First Full Day at Gambell

     There is wifi in our guest house and I should be able to post blogs.  However, it is very slow, so I've elected to omit the photographs for the moment.  Let's hope it goes well.
     All days at Gambell start with a sea watch and today was no exception even though it was drizzling which it kept doing most of the day.  We did have a French toast breakfast before heading out on our ATVs.  This was my first time driving one and I think I did pretty well negotiating over the pea gravel for which Gambell is notoriously famous.  We did see some Ancient Murrelets quite close to shore.  But further out were a few Short-tailed Shearwaters, a new bird for the year.  Later in the day we would see a more vigorous movement.  The numerical champion movers offshore were the Crested Auklets which probably numbered over a million birds in motion.  I counted passage of 120,000 per hour.  We also searched the boneyards with no success as well as a couple of sorties to the south end of Troutman Lake.  We spent a fair amount of time trying to turn a couple of Arctic Warblers into something exceptional, but Paul Lehman put a stop to that.  We looked through several flocks of gulls which were mostly Glaucous Gulls and finally found a couple of Slaty-backed Gulls, which were year birds.  There were Northern Wheatears everywhere and several White Wagtails.  Large numbers of Snow Buntings and Lapland Longspurs were flying up from near the roads.  The rain stopped and the sun shown in the evening, so after dinner John and I went out to do a brief sea watch, stopping first at the sewage lagoon.  There were a few shorebirds there including Pectoral Sandpipers, a Long-billed Dowitcher, and a couple of Sharp-tailed Sandpipers, a new birds for the year.  The three new birds brings the total to 696 for the year.