Subject: Re: Swinhoe's Storm-petrels in the North Atlantic. (fwd)
Date: Jul 19 17:42:31 1995
From: Stuart MacKay - stuart.mackay at mccaw.com


Thanks Jon,

Interesting stuff.

Angus Wilson (wilson at cshl.org) wrote:

[munch, munch, chomp, chomp]

Q1: Why are these Storm-petrels onshore in Tyneside? Is there a breeding
colony nearby? I didn't know petrels bred in the North sea or are they
scouting? Are there comparable storm-petrel banding efforts at other sites,
that so far have not recorded this species? In the back of my mind I recall
Storm-petrel ringing at headlands in eastern Scotland but I could be wrong.

[munch, munch, munch, belch, oops pardon me]

As far as anybody is aware there are no breeding petrels on mainland Britain.
Atlantic Storm-Petrels are suspected in a few places on the north coast of
Caithness and Sutherland but not proven - anyway the numbers are very small.

Storm Petrel banding is big in the UK. Around 50,000 are banded each year.
Away from colonies, tape lures of birds calling at colonies are used to
attract them ashore and they are caught in mist nets. Myself and 3 other
banders used to catch good numbers (up to 100 a night) at Noss Head,
Caithness. The birds caught are almost all pre-breeders (birds less than 3-4
years old) who wander between colonies (real or artifical :-)).
The number of banded birds is quite large, about 10% of the birds caught were
already banded. Movements were mostly between colonies in western Ireland and
the Orkney and Shetland Isles. Some birds from the Faeroes, an increasing
number from Norway. We also caught a bird with an East German band which had
been caught from a fishing boat off the coast of Madagascar - a career best !!

Incidently storm petrels in northern Norway don't start breeding until
September (when it first starts to get dark) and some birds fledge as late as
Christmas.

Petrels are mysterious beasts. Jens Kjeld Jensen in the Faeroes has done a
lot of work on censusing colonies. Previously the total population for the
islands was around a few tens of thousands of pairs. Jensen started finding
colonies where the best estimate of the number of breeding pairs was in the
millions !!! Nobody had really looked before.

The Swinhoe's Petrel had the Tynemouth people amazed. It tooks months of
research to try and work out what the species was from the photographs taken
at the time. No collecting here of any sort you will notice - no self
respecting bander is going to pass up a banding tick by collecting a bird :-)

Incidently banders in Iceland seem to catch Wilson's Storm Petrel with
infuriating regularity - no such luck in the UK.

The scope for the north eastern US - mind boggling I would say.

Stuart
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