Black-winged petrel with data logger on its leg.
Black-winged petrel with data logger on its leg.
Seabirds such as this black-winged petrel live lifestyles at strikingly different spatial scales to other birds. In the video a mother black-winged petrel has returned to an underground burrow it uses year after year on Raoul Island where it feeds its begging chick with an oily mix of digested squid, krill and fish. After a brief visit to the burrow, which can last as little as 10 minutes, an adult returns to sea where a tracking device attached to its leg reveals the staggering scale of its foraging movements (100s – 1000s of kilometers) over the next week (orange track). Birds from neighboring burrows on Raoul Island, also feeding chicks and tracked at sea, travelled in a matter of days to the Chatham Rise to forage.
One of the birds that made these tracks could be the bird in the below video.
Video shot by Fiona Hall on Raoul Island on 12 May 2011.