Eight years ago this month I reported on my first ever sighting of a ‘Sooty Shearwater’ and this past summer I managed to chalk up another ‘first’ shearwater, this time the Great Shearwater (Ardenna gravis). I was in a boat watching humpback whales and as usual everyone else’s attention was looking out for the surfacing whales, but for me, at the back of the boat, it was the birds that caught my eye once again (see ‘Just A Seagull’). Like the sooty, the great shearwater has a pretty large wingspan, coming in at a little over one metre and no doubt this helps greatly in their exceptionally long and fast migration. As with the sootys, this large Atlantic Ocean resident also nests in the Southern hemisphere, but they travel north for a brief furlough starting in April and rarely come too close to shore. By August their holidays are over and they start making the long flight back to the few islands they nest on in the South Atlantic.
