Tuesday, June 17, 2008

sooty shearwater



I am now convinced that the bird that arrived at the door was a sooty shearwater. SB county birders are reporting swarms of them off the coast. Last Monday, three days before my bird arrived, there were reportedly in numbers exceeding 10K between Goleta pier and campus point. Our house is just a short distance away, so now I think a straggler juvenile must have crash landed at our house.

Sooty shearwaters can fly for a long time.













The flights of sooty shearwaters documented in this new study represent the longest animal migration routes ever recorded using electronic tracking technology: around 65,000 kilometers (39,000 miles). Taking advantage of prevailing winds along different parts of the migration route, the birds trace giant figure eights over the Pacific Basin.



A group of shearwaters is called an "improbability."

1 comment:

Jessica Smith said...

i like that. "improbability."

it's weird when guidebooks put their own weird codes/morals onto things like the parasitic jaeger. it can be really interesting. older guidebooks are particularly bad/good about it (i mean make particularly interesting non-objective statements).

is this real?