By Cynthia Riskin Special to The Seattle Times Harbor seals loaf like bread rising on sun-warmed beaches.
Seabirds sweep in hundreds across herring-filled waters.
Bird watchers perch like sandpipers with binoculars on the bow of the Glacier Spirit motor yacht on the spectacular Port Townsend Marine Science Center cruise to Protection Island, a national wildlife sanctuary 45 minutes by boat from Port Townsend, near the mouth of Discovery Bay. Visitors are prohibited on Protection Island, which became a preserve in 1982. Founded in 1982, the 364-acre preserve is a crowded wintering ground for many of the 190 bird species found in the area and a nesting site for 72 percent of the sea birds in Puget Sound. Winter bird watchers can see, among others, mew gulls, old squaw, ancient murrelet, bufflehead, horned grebes, surf scooters, harlequin ducks, three kinds of cormorant, several types of loon and rhinoceros auklets. The island's thousand of pairs of pale glaucous-winged gulls form Washington's largest nesting colony, said soft spoken cruise naturalist Roger Risley, who has been bird watching on the Peninsula for 25 years.