Those of you who subscribe to bird chat have probably been following
the discussion regarding storm-petrels. The die-off that exhibited
itself along the north coast of Oregon allowed me to get quantitative
with Leach's Storm-petrel. I collected (usfw permit #21994) 15 of the
individuals in reasonable condition and made the following measurements.

nare (culmen) = distance from bill tip to nasal opening
culm (exposed culmen) = distance from bill tip to feathers at edge of bill
n/c = nare to culm ratio
wing (wing chord) = distance from wrist to end of longest primary
center tail = length of center tail feather
outer tail = length of outer tail feather
c/o = center to outer tail feather ratio
tarsus = length of tarsus

My only experience previous to this was a single birds which made three
circles around Al McGie and me on the CoosBay CBC 1970-something. As far
as I know we still hold the state record for Leach'Storm-Petrels on an
Oregon CBC (though we lost the US record in the errata for that year's
reports to some count in BC).

I wanted to get to know LHSP and I figured this was a good start. Leach's
has the most strongly forked tail of the white-rumped storm-petrels. In
fact, the c/o ratio appears to be the same as Fork-tailed Storm-petrel
(though I only have access to 1 FTSP). Most of the birds were generally
a brownish gray. Many of the specimens showed a slate gray head with
an irridescence attributable to structural color. All specimens showed
a gray band along the trailing edge of the wing coverts. All specimens
showed the white rump in two distinct wedges. Bill and feet were black.


nare culm n/c wing center outer c/o tarsus
tail tail tail
6.7 12.8 0.52 155 60 77 0.78 24
7.5 15.4 0.48 156 67 82 0.82 25
7.6 15.4 0.49 163 69 86 0.80 25
7.6 13.6 0.55 151 65 77 0.84 23
7.7 14.3 0.54 154 63 82 0.77 23
7.9 14.7 0.54 159 65 79 0.82 25
8.0 15.3 0.52 148 63 78 0.81 22
8.0 14.5 0.55 157 66 81 0.81 23
8.2 16.4 0.50 159 68 87 0.78 25
8.2 16.0 0.51 164 68 83 0.82 25
8.3 14.4 0.58 159 70 81 0.86 25
8.3 14.2 0.58 145 64 77 0.83 24
8.5 15.2 0.56 160 67 84 0.80 26
8.7 15.0 0.58 154 65 80 0.81 23
8.7 14.5 0.60 166 69 83 0.83 24

8.0 14.8 0.54 157 66 81 0.81 24 avg
0.52 0.91 0.04 5.8 2.7 3.2 0.03 1.1 std


--
*********************************** I was of three minds
* Mike Patterson, Astoria, OR * like a tree
* mpatters at orednet.org * in which there are three blackbirds.
*http://www.pacifier.com/~mpatters* -Wallace Stevens