All species › Tubenoses › Petrels, shearwaters and diving petrels › Kerguelen Petrel
Kerguelen Petrel | Aphrodroma brevirostris
Kerguelenstormvogel | Petrel de las Kerguelen
The Kerguelen Petrel is an all sooty-grey tubenose of the Southern Ocean with a strikingly large head, a steep forehead and a short, deep, heavy bill. The flight is what marks it out: it towers in steep arcs up to thirty metres above the swell and drops back down again, and takes little notice of ships. In this map window it is known mainly as a beach wreck after winter storms.
Voice
Wholly silent at sea, and even at the colony remarkably quiet for a petrel. At night a wheezy, breathy chee-chee-chay comes from the burrows, and little else. You will never hear it in this region: it does not breed here.
No freely licensed recording has been found for this species yet; what to listen for is described below.
Identification
Thirty-four centimetres and about three hundred and fifty grams, though the short tail and big head make the bird look more compact and stocky than that. The plumage is uniform sooty grey above and below, with a silvery sheen at the base of the primaries from beneath in good light; no pattern anywhere, no pale head, no white belly. The bill is black, short and conspicuously deep in profile, with heavy nasal tubes and a strong hook; the legs are pink and black. The flight is the feature that names it at range: impetuous, fast, climbing steeply in high arcs and showing no interest in the boat.
Confusion species
Great-winged Petrel (Pterodroma macroptera) is the first candidate: larger, longer-winged, greyer around the bill base and with a far heavier, longer bill, and it flies slower, broader arcs. Providence Petrel (Pterodroma solandri) is also dark but shows white flashes at the base of the primaries on the underwing and a pale-speckled face. Sooty Shearwater (Ardenna grisea) is longer and slimmer, with a long thin bill and a silvery-white panel down the middle of the underwing. The Procellaria petrels — Black Petrel (Procellaria parkinsoni), Westland Petrel (Procellaria westlandica), White-chinned Petrel (Procellaria aequinoctialis) — are all much larger and have a pale horn-coloured bill instead of a black one. At range the silhouette separates it best: no other dark petrel here carries so large a head on so short a body.
Habitat
Cold, deep Southern Ocean water between the subtropical convergence and the edge of the pack ice, where it takes small squid and crustaceans from the surface, mostly at night. It breeds in burrows on peaty, fern-covered slopes of subantarctic islands, none of them inside this map window.
Where the bird is most often found, arranged by main group and formation.
Range and movements
It does not breed in this region: the colonies are on Gough and Inaccessible in the Atlantic and on Marion, Prince Edward, Crozet and Kerguelen in the Indian Ocean. In New Zealand and Australian waters it is a vagrant rarely seen from a boat, but it comes ashore every year as a beach wreck on the west coast beaches of New Zealand, mainly in winter and early spring. Numbers swing wildly: one bird was found in 1979, six hundred in 1984. Such mass wrecks follow prolonged Southern Ocean storms in which starving birds fail to cope. In Australia the few records come almost entirely from the cold sea off Tasmania and Victoria.
Where and when to look
After a sustained south-westerly gale in July or August, walk a west coast beach on either New Zealand island — Ninety Mile Beach, the beaches near Muriwai, the Wellington west coast — and watch for a medium-sized, uniformly grey tubenose with a strikingly thick, short bill. At sea, hunt for the flight: a dark bird that climbs in high steep arcs and ignores the boat completely is almost always this species.
Conservation
Least Concern (LC): the world population is put at one to two hundred thousand pairs and the colonies lie on remote islands. Where cats and rats were introduced they have done severe damage at some colonies — whole slopes on Kerguelen and Crozet have been emptied. The species hardly follows fishing vessels and so suffers little bycatch; the mass wrecks look like a natural phenomenon tied to storms and food shortage, though how heavily they weigh on the population is unknown.
Scientific name
Aphrodroma brevirostris | (Lesson, 1831)
Lesson described the species in 1831 as Procellaria brevirostris; because the genus has since changed, author and year are bracketed, and the original work gives no type locality. brevirostris means 'short-billed', from Latin brevis 'short' and rostrum 'bill' — exactly the feature that names it in the hand. The species has moved from genus to genus: from Procellaria to Pterodroma, then to its own genus Lugensa, and finally to Aphrodroma, introduced by Storrs Olson in 2000 from Greek aphros 'sea foam' and -dromos 'racer': foam-runner.