It has been a rough few decades for endangered yellow-eyed penguins (Megadyptes antipodes). The species can only be found along a small portion of the southeastern coast of New Zealand’s South Island, the nearby Auckland Islands, and the isles of Campbell, Stewart and Codfish. Their total population numbered nearly 7,000 birds just 30 years ago [...]

My photography skills – if I can call them that – are pretty atrocious. While on a break in Wales recently, I managed to photograph a sequence in which a Herring gull Larus argentatus (one of our most frequently encountered gulls) swallowed a Common sea star Asterias rubens. Yeah, that’s right, get into the habit [...]

As a regular Tet Zoo reader (right?) you’ll be aware of the petrel series. I’m keen to finish it (hey, just as I am with all the other still-incomplete Tet Zoo series), so let’s crack on. In previous articles, we looked at gadfly-petrels, the members of Fulmarini, and also at the evolution, biology and diversity [...]

Some time back I started a series on the remarkable tubenosed seabirds known as the petrels (see below for links). Previous articles introduced the group as a whole before discussing one of the four major petrel clades, the gadfly-petrels or pterodromines. The time to finish this series is now well overdue, so here we look [...]

Time for more petrels. Having introduced general aspects of petrel biology, diversity and evolution in the previous articles (part I, part II, part III, part IV), it’s now time to get through the different petrel lineages. As explained in the previous article, recent molecular phylogenetic studies indicate that true petrels (Procellariidae) consist of four major [...]

After a number of unplanned distractions (involving the story behind the Archaeopteryx forgery claim, the time-honoured tradition that is April 1st, feathered tyrannosaurs, horned dinosaurs, chickens, ‘Cadborosaurus’, Eld’s deer, and intraguild predation in, and the phylogeny of, raptors), it’s time to get back on track and carry on looking at tubenose seabirds, and petrels in [...]

What with my recent effort to write a lot about tubenosed seabirds (specifically, true petrels or procellariids: see links below), I consider it a peculiar coincidence that I happened to chance upon a copy of Ronald Lockley’s Flight of the Storm Petrel in a second-hand bookshop. Note that this book (Lockley 1983) is about storm-petrels [...]

Time for more petrels. This article is another introduction, this time to generalities of behaviour and form-function. The previous petrel articles are here and here, and see the list of links below as well. Several distinct foraging styles are employed by petrels and they’re more diverse in feeding behaviour than most accounts imply. The majority [...]

In the previous article we looked very briefly at a few basic aspects of petrel diversity, focusing in particular on their distinctive, tube-nosed bills (though, note: not unique to petrels but present across Procellariiformes). Here, I want to look at these birds in a bit more depth. We focus here on oil production and storage [...]

Seabirds are fascinating (as I often say: hey, just like all the other tetrapods). To me, they’ve always seemed to be one of those groups that requires a lifetime of immersion and specialisation should you hope to become properly acquainted with them. I just don’t feel that you can get to know them via books [...]

Neat observations are published on animals all the time. Many are relatively mundane, or are additional records of things we already know about. But some are really fantastic and have the potential to open a whole new chapter in our understanding of behaviour, ecology and evolution. As we’ll see, even if they’re not brand new, [...]