The storm that knocked out Wellton's water also carried ocean birds into the desert

Most of us remember the weekend of Oct. 10 for the wind. A 53-mph gust at the airport, retaining walls down in the Foothills, Wellton's water system knocked offline when the power went out. We wrote about all of that at the time.

What a lot of us missed is that the storm brought passengers.

Birds that don't belong here

Rachel started as a major hurricane far out in the Pacific off southwestern Mexico, peaking at Category 3 on Oct. 1. It wandered for more than a week, then turned and came ashore as a tropical storm south of Ensenada, Baja California, on the night of Oct. 10 and 11. Its remnants rode straight up over the desert.

Somewhere along the way, it scooped up storm-petrels.

If you've never seen one, a storm-petrel is a small dark seabird, roughly swallow-sized, that spends nearly its whole life over open ocean. They are not desert birds. They are not lake birds. Seeing one from a boat off Baja is a good day. Seeing one in Arizona is a once-in-several-years event that happens only when a tropical storm drags them here.

That's what happened. "Tropical Storm Rachel carried a cargo of storm-petrels straight into the desert," Tom Ford-Hutchinson wrote in a roundup for the American Birding Association on Oct. 27.

What turned up around Yuma

A few miles upriver, on the California side, the ABA reported Elegant Terns at Senator Wash Reservoir near Imperial Dam.

The storm-petrels themselves mostly turned up a little farther away:

• Salton Sea: Wedge-rumped and Least Storm-Petrels on Oct. 11 at spots including Bombay Beach and Desert Shores. Off the west end of Young Road, birders counted as many as five Wedge-rumped, six Least and three Black Storm-Petrels through at least Oct. 17.
• Lake Havasu: about 10 Wedge-rumped Storm-Petrels on the Arizona side on Oct. 12, plus a Least. Birders went out by boat afterward and photographed the ones that stuck around.
• Utah: the strangest part. Storm-petrels landed on reservoirs more than 680 miles from where Rachel came ashore, giving Utah its first records ever of three species. One Wedge-rumped was still on Utah Lake on Oct. 24.

The Wedge-rumped Storm-Petrel, for the record, nests on the Galápagos Islands and off Peru.

This has happened before

Not often, but it has. Remnants of Hurricane Newton pushed multiple Wedge-rumped Storm-Petrels into southern Arizona in 2016, according to the Arizona Bird Committee's records report, and a Black Storm-Petrel turned up three days after that storm passed. Hurricane Hilary did something similar in 2023, the ABA noted.

So when a Pacific storm heads our way, the birders in town have learned to set an alarm.

The sad part

Here's the thing nobody likes to say out loud. For most of these birds, it's a one-way trip.

A storm-petrel needs the ocean. A reservoir in the desert can keep one alive for a little while, but it's a long way home, and many don't make it. A birder who watched storm-petrels on Utah Lake told KUER that they saw at least one dead on the water, and that's the expectation.

There's a small, odd hope in the ABA's write-up: Rachel weakened before it came ashore, and the author suggests a gentler storm may deliver more living birds to distant lakes. Some of those Elegant Terns at Mittry Lake may well have found their way back to the Gulf. Terns are better at that than storm-petrels.

Nobody can tell you how many made it. What we can say is that for one weird weekend in October, you could stand at a marsh north of Yuma and watch birds from the open Pacific fly past.

Sources

• American Birding Association (Tom Ford-Hutchinson), Rachel's Inland Seabird Fallout, October 2026, Oct. 27, 2026. Storm history, landfall, species, sites, counts and dates.
• American Birding Association (Nate Swick), Rare Bird Alert: October 30, 2026. Hilary comparison.
• eBird, Arizona Rare Bird Alert, Oct. 11, 2026 reports for Mittry Lake, Gila River at Avenue 20E and Yuma West Wetlands. Reports are submitted by birders and are not yet reviewed by the state records committee.
• Arizona Bird Committee, Report, 2015-2017 records. Hurricane Newton storm-petrel records.
• KUER, Tropical Storm Rachel brought Utah plenty of rain, and ocean birds, Oct. 15, 2026.
• Yuma Informed, Storms knock out water in Wellton, collapse walls in the Foothills.