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You are a 18th Century sailor, setting foot on a remote Pacific island on Halloween evening. You’ve rowed to the island to find fresh water for the ship, only to be greeted by this frightful moaning.
Some early sailors feared this ungodly wailing meant they had been tricked ashore at the gates of Hell itself, when in truth they stood shuddering among courting pairs of seabirds called Wedge-tailed Shearwaters.
Dark, gull-sized seabirds with long, thin, tapering wings, Wedge-tailed Shearwaters nest on islands in the tropical Pacific and Indian Oceans, from Hawaii, to western Australia, to Madagascar. Most dig burrows to nest in, two to six feet deep with a bend that allows the incubating birds to rest unseen. From dusk to midnight during courtship, pairs of Wedge-tailed Shearwaters sit facing one another on the ground, and puff up their throats to perform long duets of eerie wailing – sometimes sending spooked sailors rowing in panic back to their ship for a ration of grog.
The bird calls you hear on BirdNote come from the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Treat yourself to a look at a Wedge-tailed Shearwater when you come to our website, BirdNote.org. I’m Michael Stein.
Call of the Wedge-tailed Shearwaters provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Wedge-tailed Shearwater 1801 recorded by F.N. Robinson
Ambient ocean sound recorded by John Kessler.
BirdNote's theme music was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
Producer: John Kessler
Executive Producer: Dominic Black
© 2014 Tune In to Nature.org October 2014 Narrator: Michael Stein; Writer: Bob Sundstrom