I still love to chase birds on the beach, don’t you? And sometimes I even wonder what kind they are and what they eat. It seems that birding is very popular and satisfying on the Oregon Coast. Birding is a year-round activity here, with the best birding during migrations in the spring and fall.
Attending a birding festival is an enjoyable way to combine a weekend getaway with birding. There are three major birding fests on the Oregon Coast. The last weekend in February is the Birding and Blues Festival held in Pacific City on the north coast; in late March and Early April, it’s the Aleutian Goose Festival held just across the state line in Crescent City, California; and in early September it’s the Oregon Shorebird Festival held in Charleston in Oregon’s Bay Area.
The coast is popular for birding because of the variety of habitats: open ocean, beaches, estuaries, old-growth forests, and river valleys. Pelagic birding involves going out on the ocean by boat to observe seabirds such as alcids like common murres and rhinoceros auklets, as well as the long distance fliers like albatrosses, petrels, and shearwaters. The Shorebird and Aleutian Goose festivals are two events where pelagic birding trips are offered with birding experts onboard. Marine Discovery Tours based in Newport offers two-hour Sea Life Cruises on the ocean with a naturalist onboard pinpointing all types of sea life including seabirds.
Along the beaches expect to see gulls, shorebirds, birds of prey, and in the offshore waters sea ducks (except during nesting season) and alcids. The headlands and offshore rocks, protected by the Oregon Islands National Wildlife Refuge, provide nesting habitat for 13 species of seabirds including gulls, pigeon guillemots, three species of cormorants, common murres, and tufted puffins.
