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All:
The Bermuda Petrel (Cahow) story as concerns Nova Scotia - including a
spring sight record by a CWS employee on the Scotia Shelf - will be
covered the seabird writeups by Eric Mills in the next issue of "Nova
Scotia Bird" - another good reason for belonging to the Society for
its modest fee. It must be kept in mind that the results from data
loggers (which give daily estimates of sunrise and sunset, from which
positions can be approximated) can be pretty unreliable - 100s of km
off. The conclusion that one or two reached the Gulf of St. Lawrence
may be dubious, and the inference that young come here routinely to
feed on krill is speculative.
Also, the following statements may be inaccurate:
"We were suspicious when we got the first tags back, so we put the
word out to Canadian fishermen and others in the northern regions
where the cahows were being logged. . . They duly received reports
that they were occasionally being seen in those areas. . . We thought
the bird might have been confused with other petrels. But when we got
a photograph, it was unmistakeably a cahow. So we know, every year,
they go up to Canadian waters."
I believe the photo referred to was actually taken during a marine
mammal survey along the shelf break of Georges Bank, about 6 km s. of
the Canadian Boundary. The link to "Canadian fishermen and others in
northern regions" may be dodgy. The "Others" referred to may the CWS
observer and the U.S. marine mammal surveyer.
That is not to say that Cahows don't wander here - the combined
evidence is strong. But how many, how often, and why are not yet clear.
Cheers, Ian
Ian McLaren
Quoting "Wayne P. Neily" <neilyornis@hotmail.com>:
>
> Hello all,
>
> Although not all relate to NS, several interesting bits of news
> about pelagics have come to my attention this weekend. Although I
> have not seen anything on it on these lists or in NS Birds, readers
> of North American Birds will be aware that some radio-tagged Cahows
> (a very endangered species also known as Bermuda Petrel) have
> occurred as far north as the waters of the Atlantic Provinces.
> Richard Cannings has called attention to this interesting article on
> the species in Friday's news:
> http://www.royalgazette.com/article/20110310/ISLAND/703109999/-1/Island .
> Anyone not faniliar with the story behind this should look it up and
> be inspired by the way that the efforts of one person (David
> Wingate) rescued this species from the brink of extinction.
>
> Another bird back from the brink of extinction, the Short-tailed
> Albatross, had been recovering in its Japanese nesting colony, and,
> as you may have noticed in a recent report of the American Bird
> Conservancy,
> http://www.abcbirds.org/newsandreports/stories/110124.html , its
> first successful nest in the USA was seen this year on Midway Atoll.
> Its recovery also owes a lot to one great voice for bird protection
> - for a long time almost the only one in Japan - the late Yoshimaro
> Yamashina. This week, one of the few Canadian records was reported
> by eBird, although without an observer, apparently based on the
> photo of an immature off Ucluelet March 8 by Barie Hotchkiss.
>
> Another amazing albatross at Midway was mentioned in the last
> Bird Studies Canada news:
> http://www.bsc-eoc.org/organization/bscnews.html - Wisdom, a 60-year
> old Laysan Albatross is still sucessfully breeding. Incidentally,
> she was banded in 1956 by someone who, at 92, is another inspiration
> based on what one person can do for conservation - Chan Robbins, who
> is best known to most as author of one of the major field guides and
> founder of the Breeding Bird Survey, among other things.
>
> The recent tsunami in Japan, apart from its consequences for
> humans, might have been disastrous for the reproduction of the
> Short-tailed Albatross on Torishimo this year (no word yet), and it
> did sweep over much of Midway, although with much reduced force.
> Much of the colonies of Black-footed and Laysan Albatrosses there
> were lost, but Wisdom seems to have chosen her nest site wisely; her
> young survived, as did the Short-tailed's nest there:
> http://www.suite101.com/content/oldest-albatross-survives-tsunami-damage-to-midway-atoll-a358474 . A little bit of good news amidst the
> gloom.
>
> Cheers,
>
>
>
> Wayne P. Neily
> Tremont, Kings Co., Nova Scotia
>
>
>
> "Think globally, Act locally." - René Dubos, 1972.
>
>
>
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