Wildlife and Birding in October on San Juan Island

By Naturalist Ellie Sawyer

In Autumn our little island community starts packing up for winter - stores are reducing their hours, kids are going back to school, and many of our seasonal workers are heading for warmer climates. That doesn’t mean the wildlife is also leaving our fair shores.

Nothing could be further from the truth! September and October are our favorite months of the year for birding and wildlife watching.

We see our Bigg’s killer whales just as frequently as we do in the summer — as the Steller’s sea lions return from the coast to their breeding grounds, the marine-mammal hunting subspecies of killer whales follow along this migration. Steller’s sea lions are the predominant prey for our inner-coastal Bigg’s killer whales.

While most whale watch companies run through to the end of October, Maya’s Legacy Whale Watching runs until the end of the year if there is enough interest!

Fall is also a phenomenal time to see the tail-end of our humpback season! Humpback whales are well-fed after a summer of gorging on herring, sand lance, krill, and other baitfish. You can see them at their most social before they leave for the breeding waters of Hawai’i and Mexico. It is possible to see them engaging in mild courtship behavior — males accompanying females or acting competitively with each other — but it is more likely to see more curious behaviors like spyhops and breaching, since their bellies are full and they are a little less single-minded about food, and it is a lot more likely to see more of them in a single area - sometimes, if your eco-tour goes far enough West, you can see aggregations of 20 or more individuals!

Autumn is also the time to go birding on San Juan Island. Birds are returning from both the interior United States, like our Western grebes who can be seen foraging in our inter-island channels, and from the sub-Arctic, like our short-eared owls who hunt at dusk along the stretches of South Beach and our ancient murrelets who return from the breeding colonies along the Aleutian Islands’ coastlines.

You can see ducks of all sorts returning from their tundra breeding grounds to feed here in our nutrient-rich waters: buffleheads, mergansers, long-tailed ducks, and goldeneyes are some favorites of our local birders. Trumpeter and tundra swans have also been making a remarkable comeback on-island after they were nearly hunted to extinction across the United States - and every winter, San Juan Preservation Trust leads a swan count to keep tabs on how our large waterfowl friends are faring.

While you are driving up to the San Juans, or on your way home, stop in Skagit Valley - you will see thousands of snow geese feeding on the tulip and daffodil fields left bare after a successful season of flowers. These delicate geese may be small on their own, but to see them take flight all together is something special. With the backdrop of Skagit farmland and the North Cascades, it is a spectacular stop on your travels to the San Juan Islands.