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Bulwer's Petrel | Bulweria bulwerii
Bulwers stormvogel | Petrel de Bulwer
Bulwer's Petrel is a small, wholly sooty-brown tubenose with long narrow wings and a strikingly long, tapering tail, fluttering low and erratically over the water like a bat. It is a bird of the tropical oceans that appears in this map window only as a vagrant — though records off eastern Australia are on the increase.
Voice
At sea it is entirely silent. At the breeding colony, far outside this region, it calls at night from the cavity under the rocks: a deep, barking, chuffing coq-coq-coq, repeated for hours, more suggestive of a frog or a dog than of a seabird.
No freely licensed recording has been found for this species yet; what to listen for is described below.
Identification
Twenty-six to twenty-eight centimetres and under a hundred grams: the smallest all-dark tubenose you could meet here. The plumage is uniform sooty brown, the only marking a pale, light-brown diagonal band across the upperwing coverts that catches the eye as a vague stripe at range. The wings are long, narrow and pointed, the tail long and drawn out into a wedge or even a single point in normal flight. The bill is short and black with heavy, strongly raised nasal tubes. The flight gives it away best: low over the surface, erratic, buoyant and bat-like, with loose wingbeats alternating with short fast glides and sudden changes of direction. No white anywhere.
Confusion species
The dark storm petrels are smaller, shorter-winged, and patter over the surface with their feet rather than gliding away. Wedge-tailed Shearwater (Ardenna pacifica) also has a wedge tail, but is almost twice as long, flies on stiff, raised wings in slow arcs and has a pale bill. Sooty Shearwater (Ardenna grisea) is much larger and shows a silvery-white panel on the underwing. From the dark gadfly petrels — Great-winged Petrel (Pterodroma macroptera), Providence Petrel (Pterodroma solandri) — it is separated by size, far lighter build and the long tail; those species have a short blunt tail and a much heavier bill. Anyone who sees a small, all-dark, long-tailed bird jinking low over Australian waters should think of this species first, but should back the claim with a photograph.
Habitat
Warm, deep ocean water, usually far from land, where it takes small squid, lanternfish and surface crustaceans at night. It breeds colonially in rock crevices, cavities under boulders and lava tubes on tropical islands; within this guide's map window it breeds nowhere.
Where the bird is most often found, arranged by main group and formation.
Range and movements
A vagrant. The nearest breeding grounds lie far out in the tropical Pacific (Kiribati, the Marquesas, Hawaii, the Bonin Islands). Australian records are scattered: north-west Australia, Victoria (1984) and north-eastern Australia (1989), followed by Queensland records in 2013, 2018 and 2020; and in the Tasman Sea five birds were seen between 24 January and 8 March 2020, some two thousand kilometres south of the core range — probably no accident but a response to productive water with baitfish and cetaceans, and possibly a sign of a southward shift. New Zealand has just two accepted records: a beach-wrecked bird at Te Horo in January 1998 and a live bird at New Brighton Beach, Christchurch, in January 2014. One exhausted bird even landed on a club balcony at Cronulla near Sydney in February 2020 and was later released off Darwin.
Where and when to look
Do not count on it. The realistic chance is a warm-season pelagic well off Queensland or north-western Australia, or a boat in the Tasman Sea in a warm-water year; then look for the small, dark, long-tailed shape that flutters just above the swell instead of gliding. Photograph anything that fits: the verdict almost always comes afterwards, from the tail shape and the pale wing band.
Conservation
Least Concern (LC): the species breeds in numbers across three oceans, with a world population in the hundreds of thousands. Rats and cats are the main threat at the colonies, and on some islands light pollution disorients fledglings; within this map window conservation hardly applies to it, because it does not breed here.
Scientific name
Bulweria bulwerii | (Jardine & Selby, 1828)
Jardine and Selby described the species in 1828 as Procellaria bulwerii; because the genus has since changed, author and year are bracketed. Both the epithet and the genus name honour James Bulwer (1794–1879), English clergyman and naturalist, who collected the first specimen on Madeira; Madeira is accordingly the type locality. The genus Bulweria was introduced by Bonaparte in 1843.