Shear(water) Luck

Manx shearwater chick found at Matinicus Rock, ME
Photo by Robert Houston

Its fluffy down legs gave it away. The bird that Audubon’s Seabird Restoration Program researchers pulled from a burrow on Maine’s Matinicus Rock in September was the first Manx shearwater of fledging age ever recorded in the United States.

If they’d arrived a day or two later, the researchers might have missed it, says Stephen Kress, Restoration Program director. Manx shearwater chicks take 120 days to hatch and leave the nesting burrow, so it’s difficult to predict an exact fledge date (when the bird’s feathers and body have developed enough for it to leave its nest for the first time).

But the researchers got lucky, finding and banding an ecologically significant individual. “We’re seeing a natural range expansion,” Kress says. “It suggests that the habitat is healthy, not just the island habitat, but the marine habitat as well.” It also protects Manx shearwaters should disaster strike primary nesting habitats, including Iceland, the Faeroe Islands, Great Britain, Ireland, France, and possibly the Azores, Madeira, and the Canary Islands, according to Birds of North America.

Kress predicts this won’t be the last Manx shearwater to fledge on Matinicus Rock, particularly because the species is not endangered or threatened. He says, “No one knows how large this colony will grow.”

Click here for more information about Manx shearwaters.