ALONG with the featherballs that visit back gardens and parks, seabirds include some of the world’s most familiar avian species. Gulls, terns and cormorants, puffins, pelicans and penguins, gannets, fulmars and auks are all part of this 350 species-strong group, made up of mostly ancient families.
Some, such as the penguin family, do virtually nothing but go to sea, while others, like certain ducks, seem to toy with the idea, with a handful of species, such as king eider and velvet scoter, actually getting their webbed feet salty wet.
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Seabirds come in a range of sizes, from the royal albatross, soaring above the ocean on 3.5-metre wings, to the sparrow-sized storm petrel that dances across wave tops. They are also ecologically diverse: terns and puffins catch shallow-water sand eels, while prion petrels skim surface plankton, and guillemots dive deep for fish and squid.
Yet for the longest time, almost all we knew about them came from ringing and from observations at breeding colonies. This yielded information on everything from diet, breeding cycles and longevity, to the considerable distances travelled by some species, even in those frantic months when there were clamouring beaks to be filled.
All of this research was worthwhile, but, as Michael Brooke explains in his new book, Far from Land, it omitted crucial and extensive detail of the biology of many species: what they actually did in the open sea, and where and when they did it, especially when not breeding on wave-thrashed rocks.
The problem, Brooke points out, is that cliff-based observations can tell you pretty much all you need to know about seabirds that do all their living close to shore, such as gannets, gulls and terns. But many others simply disappear into the sea mist once they have reproduced, which both frustrates biologists and worries conservationists. The annual vanishing act led to some really odd knowledge gaps. For example, no one knew where puffins went in the winter (the open waters of the north Atlantic), and important details about the diet and feeding patterns of the albatross were uncertain. One solution emerged only recently with the microelectronics that enable us to track seabirds with satellites and reveal their secrets.
“Albatrosses have an energy-saving mechanism that locks their wings in place while they soar”
Brooke is the ideal narrator for the tale of this transition. He is a zoologist at the University of Cambridge, with a 40-year research career that began on the UK’s Fair Isle (part of Shetland) and has taken him to some of the ocean’s most remote and craggy islands.
He shares his encyclopedic knowledge with dry wit and fine attention to detail in this absorbing book. I was fascinated to learn that albatrosses have an energy-saving mechanism that locks their wings in place while they soar, and that while puffins look cute, they are hell to handle because of their big, strong beak and sharp claws.
There is, clearly, much still to learn. One new species, the Pincoya storm petrel, was described as recently as 2011, and the nesting site of Hornby’s storm petrel was discovered only in April 2017 – some 70 kilometres into Chile’s Atacama desert.
Brooke is a man who adores his subject (seabird biologists are, apparently, “people who love nothing more than the smell of guano”). His enthusiasm is so infectious that Far from Land is bound to hatch some much- needed new devotees. Seabirds, it turns out, need all the help they can get: designed for long lives, low mortality and slow reproduction, many have been decimated by long-line fishing and marine pollution. If we are not more vigilant, the satellite-tracking revolution Brooke reveals may, for many species, merely provide a tragically accurate record of their demise.
Princeton University Press
This article appeared in print under the headline “Secret lives at sea”
