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Manx Shearwater | Puffinus puffinus
Noordse pijlstormvogel | Pardela Pichoneta
The Manx Shearwater is a small, crisply black-and-white shearwater that skims low over the water on fast, stiff beats and banking glides. It breeds in the North Atlantic and winters off South America; a small proportion reaches southern African waters.
Voice
Silent at sea. At the colonies a loud, crowing and hiccupping cackle at night, kaa-kaa-koo-ooh, from the burrows and in the air.
Recording: Anthony McGeehan — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · shortened to the first 60 s, mono · xeno-canto
Identification
Small, 30 to 38 cm, with straight, pointed wings. The upperparts are uniformly blackish and the underparts pure white. The dark cap extends below the eye with a sharp border to the white throat; a white crescent curls up behind the ear coverts. The underwing is white with a narrow dark margin; the undertail coverts are white. The slender bill is dark grey and the legs pink with a black outer side. Sexes alike. It flies with bursts of fast, stiff wingbeats and then glides, tilting from side to side so that the black upperside and white underside flash alternately.
Confusion species
Tropical Shearwater (Puffinus bailloni) is smaller, browner above, has dark undertail coverts and a faster, fluttering flight. Little Shearwater (Puffinus assimilis) is smaller and more compact, with white around the eye and a blue-grey tinge to the upperparts. Mediterranean Shearwater (Puffinus yelkouan) is browner above, less crisply patterned and has dark undertail coverts; Balearic Shearwater (Puffinus mauretanicus) is duller still, with dusky underparts.
Habitat
Open sea, especially over the continental shelf and in cool, productive water. It hunts small shoaling fish such as sardine and anchovy, and squid, diving from the surface. It rarely follows ships. It breeds in burrows on islands and mountain slopes, often in large colonies.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of southern Africa.
Range and movements
A scarce summer visitor off the Western and Southern Cape, especially between Cape Point and the Agulhas Bank; a few records off Namibia, the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal. Several birds ringed in Britain and Ireland have been recovered in South Africa. It breeds mainly on islands around Britain and Ireland, also in Iceland, the Faroes, Brittany, the Azores, Madeira and the Canaries and in small numbers in North America. It winters mainly off the east coast of South America.
- Resident
- Passage (Mar–Apr, Oct–Nov)
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Between November and March, search on pelagic trips from Cape Town for small black-and-white shearwaters over shallow water on the shelf. A crisply marked, low-skimming bird with white undertail coverts is almost certainly this species. Photograph the undertail and head: they rule out the rarer species.
Conservation status
Not threatened. The population is large, with the bulk on the islands of Rum, Skomer and Skokholm. Introduced rats and cats on breeding islands, light pollution and bycatch are local threats; rats have been successfully eradicated on several islands.
Scientific name
Puffinus puffinus | (Brünnich, 1764)
Brünnich described the species in 1764 as Procellaria puffinus; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Puffinus was introduced in 1760 by Brisson. Puffinus comes from English puffin and its variants, the name for the cured nestling of the shearwater, once a delicacy. The specific name repeats the genus name. The specimen the first description was based on came from the Faroe Islands and Norway.