Review: Petrels, Albatrosses & Storm-Petrels of North America

The bird blogosphere has been buzzing with the release of another new field guide. One blog has already proclaimed it a strong contender for the best bird book of the year; other blogs have also been strong in their praise for the guide. This is a guide to the tubenose order, Procellariformes. This order includes storm-petrels, albatrosses, fulmars, petrels, shearwaters, and diving-petrels (the latter not covered as they occur outside the book's geographic range). Tubenoses as a group are named for the horny tubes that encase their nostrils. Since tubenoses live at sea for most of the year, they must drink saltwater to survive, and they excrete the excess salt through their nostrils.

The new field guide, Petrels, Albatrosses & Storm-Petrels of North America: A Photographic Guide, by Steve N. G. Howell, is a hefty tome. In fact, it is far larger and heavier than I expected and competes with The Crossley ID Guide as the heaviest field guide in my collection. It is so large and heavy that it is an unlikely candidate for field use. Instead, this is clearly a book best used as study guide at home in preparation for pelagic trips and a reference for identifying seabirds from notes or photographs following sightings.

While the hefty size will discourage field use, it accommodates a wealth of information. The heart of the book are the species accounts. These are grouped by family (petrels, albatrosses, and storm-petrels) and further divided into groups of similar species. (For example, petrels are grouped into shearwaters, gadfly petrels, and other petrels, each of which are subdivided further.) Each of the groups and subgroups is prefaced with an introduction laying out which features are most useful for identification and warning about identification pitfalls. The species accounts themselves are lengthy, with an emphasis on distribution and separating the species from similar species. Each account is accompanied by a range map showing the breeding and nonbreeding ranges (with arrows showing movements and numbers for what months they appear) and photographic plates. The plates are a major strength of the guide, with numerous, beautiful photographs for each species, showing a full range of variation. It must have taken a substantial effort to gather so much visual documentation.

When examining a new field guide, it is tempting to skip the introduction and turn straight to the plates. With this new tubenose guide, it is definitely worth reading the introduction unless you are already an expert at seabird identification. The introduction includes notes on the taxonomy and life histories of tubenoses, as one would expect. The book does not strictly follow the AOU Checklist, which Howell describes as "particularly anachronistic," but instead tries to present current taxonomy as represented in scientific papers. Since tubenose classification is currently in flux, the number of ordering of species in the future seems likely to differ from both the current AOU Checklist and Howell's presentation. Howell notes which taxa are the most uncertain. Advice on tubenose identification, and how it is affected by conditions at sea and molt patterns, follows the discussion of taxonomy.

The introduction also includes a primer on ocean habitats and how those affect the life histories and distribution of seabirds. This may not be obvious to the landbound birder – it was not obvious to me, anyway – but the seemingly uniform surface of the ocean conceals a variety of habitat types underneath. These habitats are affected by currents, temperature gradients, and other factors, and some are far more abundant in food sources than others. Where the best food sources are can shift from day to day, and along with them, where the most seabird diversity can be found.

Petrels, Albatrosses & Storm-Petrels of North America: A Photographic Guide, by Steve N. G. Howell is a must-have for birders with a strong interest in pelagic birding and desirable for birders living near the coast, as some tubenose species may be seen from land on occasion. Land-locked birders will probably find the guide less useful, but it will still be of interest for learning about the birds that make their living on the ocean.

Bird Impacts of the New Zealand Spill

An oiled White-capped Albatross (Forest & Bird)

BirdLife has a bit more on how birds are being affected by the oil spill in New Zealand that I mentioned in yesterday's Loose Feathers. It seems that breeding seabirds are most affected:

Many seabirds are currently breeding on offshore islands in the Bay of Plenty and nearby regions and any impact on the parent birds will also affect their chicks. These seabirds breed in burrows so any birds with oil on their feathers could carry that oil into their nests and harm their chicks as well. If the parent birds have swallowed oil, both they and any chicks they feed are likely to die or be harmed, and the chicks of parents that die will starve.

Karen Baird said it was important that experts should get out to the breeding colonies to check on the harm occurring there. Among the dead birds recorded so far are 178 Common Diving-petrels Pelecanoides urinatrix, 114 Fluttering Shearwaters Puffinus gavia, 68 Buller’s Shearwaters Puffinus bulleri and 13 Little Penguins Eudyptula minor, along with smaller numbers of albatrosses and other species of petrel....

Eleven oiled Little Penguins were taken to the Oiled Wildlife Response Unit in Mount Maunganui overnight and five New Zealand Dotterels Charadrius obscurus had been removed from areas threatened by oil pollution at Matakana Island, Maketu and Pukehina.

Little Penguins Forage Far from their Nests

Little Penguins / Credit: Phillip Island Nature Parks

A new study tracks the foraging behavior of Little Penguins nesting on Australia's Phillip Island.

"When little penguins finish what we call the 'guard stage' and can first leave their chicks for extended periods of time, they are quite hungry, so they go on two long trips, which allows them to replenish their own energy stocks," says Dr Andre Chiaradia, a biologist at Phillip Island Nature Parks and co-author of the study.

"These extended journeys are well known in offshore seabirds like albatross, but normally we would expect inshore seabirds like the little penguin to take only short trips," he told Australian Geographic.

"Short foraging trips yield larger meals and allow for regular provisioning of chicks. But adults can deplete their energy reserves during these trips and ultimately risk their own survival," says co-author Claire Saraux, a PhD student from the University of Strasbourg in France.

To replenish themselves, adults have to take some longer trips when they reach a critically low body weight, she says. "The two consecutive long trips therefore enable little penguin parents to rebuild their reserves before another round of short trips."

The scientists used tracking devices to follow the number and duration of foraging trips. Short-range trips were more common in seasons when food was plentiful, but the penguins performed the long-range feeding trips every year regardless of food availability near the shore.

The study will be published in the journal Ecology, but it does not appear to be online yet.

Short-tailed Albatross Fledges

Short-tailed Albatross / USFWS Photo

The first Short-tailed Albatross born outside of Japan fledged this week on Eastern Island in Midway Atoll NWR.

The hatchling broke through its shell in January on Eastern Island, one of three small, flat, coral islands that comprise Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge over 1,300 miles northwest of Honolulu. The parents of the Midway chick first paired up on the refuge four years ago. During that 2007-8 breeding season, they were observed spending only a little time together, but the following season, their time together increased. By the third season, they arrived at the Eastern Island breeding colony together and built a nest, but did not lay eggs. This breeding season, one of the pair was observed incubating a freshly laid egg on November 16, 2010. The pair has been under close observation ever since. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) reports that the birds’ leg bands reveal that the male of the pair was hatched on the island of Torishima, Japan in 1987, while the female hatched there in 2003.

After the egg hatched in January, the parents spent the next five months bringing squid and flying fish to their chick every one to three days. In doing so, they logged tens of thousands of miles, likely soaring between Midway and the nutrient-rich feeding grounds some 1,000 miles to the northwest. While the parents were both away on one foraging trip, the chick was swept off its nest by the tsunami resulting from the catastrophic Japanese earthquake of 11 March.  It survived the ordeal, and in May, after months of steady feeding and growth, had lost most of its downy look and begun stretching and exercising its wings.

Anticipating its fledging, the chick was banded by FWS biologists on June 8. It has now left the island and is most likely headed in a northwesterly direction to the rich and productive waters near Hokkaido, Japan. On average, Short-tailed Albatrosses begin breeding at 6 years of age, but often begin prospecting at nesting sites several years earlier. So, it is our hope that this bird return in 4-6 years, and it could begin breeding by about 2017, provided it finds a mate.

Hopefully it will be the first of many Short-tailed Albatrosses to fledge on Eastern Island. The refuge is already home to the world's largest population of Laysan Albatrosses. This makes it a natural site to establish an alternate breeding location for an endangered albatross.

The endangered Short-tailed Albatross was once the most abundant of the North Pacific albatross species, numbering more than a million birds. It was decimated by feather hunting at the turn of the 20th Century, and by the late 1940s was thought to be extinct. In the early 1950s, ten pairs were discovered breeding on Torishima. The population has now reached 3,000 individuals, with some birds on the Senkaku Islands, but most still on Torishima.

Conservationists fear an eruption of the active volcano on Torishima could spell disaster. Starting in 2008, an international team led by Japan’s Yamashina Institute began translocating Short-tailed Albatross chicks to Mukojima Island to create a new “insurance” population. In 2011, 15 chicks were moved to Mukojima, bringing the total number translocated to 55. So far, seven of these birds have returned to Mukojima as non-breeding juveniles, an encouraging sign that they will return to breed when they reach maturity. Outside the breeding season, the Short-tailed Albatross ranges along the coasts of eastern Russia, Korea, China, Taiwan, and Alaska and the Hawaiian Islands, and occasionally off the Pacific Coast of North America.

It will be interesting to see if this is the start of a larger colony.

Oldest U.S. Bird Found Again

The oldest known bird in U.S. states and territories is a female Laysan Albatross named Wisdom. She breeds at Midway Atoll and disappeared after the recent tsunami swept over the atoll's islands. Her chick survived, and yesterday she was seen feeding her chick for the first time after the tsunami. Barry Stieglitz, Project Leader for the Hawaiian and Pacific Islands National Wildlife Refuge Complex, had this to say about Wisdom's return (pdf):

"Although wildlife biologists generally manage at the level of populations," Stieglitz said, "we, too, become entwined in the fates of individual animals. Wisdom is one such special creature. She has also provided us valuable information about the longevity of these beautiful birds - in her case over 60 years - and reinforces the importance of breeding adults in the population. It's also very humbling to know this 8-pound bird has been producing chicks longer than I have been alive."

The fate of the parents of the endangered Short-tailed Albatross chick is still unknown, but the chick at least survived.

The image at the top of this post was taken by Pete Leary of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. You can read updates about the albatrosses and cleanup from the tsunami at Midway on his blog.