All species › Tubenoses › Petrels, shearwaters and diving petrels › Common Diving Petrel
Common Diving Petrel | Pelecanoides urinatrix
Alkstormvogeltje | Potoyunco común
The Common Diving Petrel is a small, chunky tubenose that looks more like an auk than a petrel: black above, white below, with a short stubby bill and bright blue feet. It skims low and dead straight across the sea on whirring stubby wings, and meets a wave by flying through it rather than over it, coming out the far side. Underwater it simply keeps flying, with half-folded wings.
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Voice
At sea it is silent. Over and inside the colony at night comes a musical croon with an upward inflection, roughly whoo-ee-whip, repeated from the burrow and mixed with squeaks, whistles and groans. Male and female call differently — the male's version is the simpler of the two — and on a dark night a dense colony turns that chorus into a wall of sound.
No freely licensed recording has been found for this species yet; what to listen for is described below.
Identification
A small, thickset bird of twenty centimetres and about a hundred and thirty grams, with a head that looks too big for the body and hardly any visible neck. Black above, showing pale scapular stripes in fresh plumage; white below, with a grey smudge on the breast sides and a variable amount of white on throat and underwing. The bill is short, black and broad at the base, with nostrils opening upwards rather than forwards — an adaptation to diving. The legs are bright blue with black margins. The flight settles it: low, dead straight, with fast whirring beats and none of the arcing other tubenoses go in for. Tracked dives average eleven metres and reach sixty-four.
Confusion species
South Georgia Diving Petrel (Pelecanoides georgicus) is the only real problem, and it is a hard one: it has whiter underwings, grey feathering behind the eye running up like ear-muffs, white bases to the rump feathers, in some birds a slightly forked rather than square-cut tail, and a finer bill with pale blue edges. At sea the two cannot be separated with confidence; the literature in practice restricts reliable identification to birds in the hand. At range a prion (Pachyptila) can briefly confuse, but prions are grey with a dark M across the upperwing and career about in high arcs instead of whirring straight on.
Habitat
Sea over the continental shelf and in sheltered coastal water, usually within a few tens of kilometres of the colony; it is far less oceanic than most tubenoses and often lingers in the lee of islands and in straits. It breeds in burrows it digs itself in soft ground under tussock, marram or low coastal scrub, only on islands free of introduced predators, and comes ashore only after dark.
Where the bird is most often found, arranged by main group and formation.
Range and movements
Within this map window it breeds on islands all round New Zealand — the Three Kings, the Cavalli and Mercury groups in the north, and further south The Snares, Rangatira in the Chathams, the Antipodes, the Auckland Islands and Campbell — and in Australia on islets in Bass Strait and around Tasmania, with scattered colonies north to off New South Wales and west to South and Western Australia. At sea it is common in the Hauraki Gulf, in Cook Strait and Foveaux Strait and in Bass Strait, and much scarcer once you are out over deep water.
- Resident
- Breeding (summer)
- Winter
- Passage
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
Where and when to look
Take a ferry across a strait — Cook Strait, Foveaux Strait or the Tasmania crossing — and watch for small rafts of dumpy black-and-white birds that flush only at close range, whirr away low and straight, and then vanish into the sea rather than arcing over it. That dive is the mark that survives when you can see nothing of the head or the underwing. Anyone who wants to put a name on one of the two diving petrels must accept that at sea it often cannot be done.
Conservation
Least Concern (LC) as a species, but in New Zealand it carries the label 'Relict': gone from the mainland and from most inhabited islands through introduced rats, stoats, cats and weka, and now largely confined to predator-free islands. Its burrows are shallow and in soft ground, which makes it exceptionally vulnerable to any rat that gets ashore. Oil is the second danger: more than seven hundred died when the Rena grounded off Tauranga in 2011. Skuas, gulls and harriers take their share on top of that.
Scientific name
Pelecanoides urinatrix | (Gmelin, 1789)
Gmelin described the species in 1789 as Procellaria urinatrix; because it has since moved to another genus, author and year go in parentheses. The epithet urinatrix is Latin for 'female diver', from urinari, to go under water. The genus Pelecanoides was erected by Lacepede in 1799 and means 'pelican-like', after the expandable throat pouch in which the bird carries food for its chick. The type locality is Queen Charlotte Sound or Totaranui, at the northern tip of the South Island. The Maori name kuaka is also used for the Bar-tailed Godwit.