A nocturnal bird that nests underground on a chain of uninhabited islands off Western Australia’s south coast has been caught on camera in a pleasant surprise for researchers.
Little is known about the white-faced storm petrel, so when local rangers captured the first image of one returning to its nesting ground off WA’s southern coast, their reaction was shock … then jubilation.
“I swear I squealed like a small child and then everybody started laughing,” marine biologist Jennifer Lavers said.
“I was really caught off guard, it was a pretty special moment for everyone.”
Dr Lavers and rangers from the Esperance Tjaltjraak Native Title Aboriginal Corporation are studying the storm petrel to better understand why global seabird populations are in decline.
She said knowing when the birds, which fly at night and nest underground during the day, would be on the island posed its own challenge.
Mammoth migration
A cousin of the much larger albatross, storm petrels fly a mammoth 10,000-kilometre migration from the Archipelago of the Recherche, a chain of islands off WA’s south coast, to their winter nesting grounds near the Arabian Sea each year.
Estimates of when the birds return to the archipelago were anywhere between July and October — with some as late as December.
However, with the nesting season approaching, Dr Lavers and the team took a gamble and set their cameras in late August.
The gamble paid off.
“The odds of us having just absolutely nailed the timing of the deployment [of cameras] with the arrival of the birds were pretty low,” she said.
“We started scrolling through the photos and I’m thinking ho-hum, nothing’s going to happen.
“All of a sudden, bam, a bird appeared on the screen.
“That tiny little walnut has just covered at least 8,000 or 10,000 kilometres, just to be snapped in that one brief moment coming in for a landing on its island for the first time in months.”
While the discovery may seem small, Dr Lavers said it was the first time scientists were able to say definitively when the birds would return each year, allowing the team to track and monitor future breeding seasons.As birds that live off the abundance of the ocean, storm petrels provide researchers with a unique opportunity to draw parallels between the health of the species and its environment.
