So-called ‘burrow calls’, for example, are sometimes used by petrels in the air, while ‘flight calls’ are frequently used by petrels in burrows. In The Sound Approach to birding, we explained the problems of using behavioural labels for calls. Contrasting colours have been chosen to highlight calls of males, females or birds of unknown sex, young or old, inhaled or exhaled notes, and occasionally details within the sounds: harmonics, subharmonics and chaos. Other subjects, such as nestling calls and various details discussed in the text, are sometimes shown at different scales. Scales have been chosen to allow comparisons between closely related taxa, as well as between males and females where differences are known. These graphic representations of sound, where frequency is plotted against time, are explained in more detail in chapter 1. Throughout the book we have used sonagrams. It recounts my own explorations as well as those of my colleagues, visiting the colonies, listening to the sounds, and researching the literature. Killian has illustrated and annotated the plates, and the team of The Sound Approach has contributed in many areas, but the book is written in the first person. Slip on a pair of headphones if you have them, turn off lights, and play a track from the first CD accompanying this book. I am not aware of another technique that would capture the experience of being in a colony so well, especially when the callers are whizzing around your head. Most were recorded in ambient stereo using a special piece of equipment called a SASS, which we described in The Sound Approach to birding. There can be no better way to share the experiences than to let you hear them on the accompanying CDs. I feel privileged and a little spoiled that I have been able to visit colonies from Greece to the Azores, and from Iceland to the Cape Verde Islands. Nothing I have experienced is as intoxicating as total immersion in a petrel colony at night, whether it be gadfly petrels, shearwaters or storm petrels. On it were several nocturnal seabirds, and my encounters with them proved to be the start of an incurable addiction. A year later, I found myself in the Canary Islands with a list of endemics and other specialities to record. When we drafted our first species list for the project, I suggested we could easily skip the petrels, because nobody ever heard them. By this time, I had seen several species of shearwaters and storm petrels, but I had still never listened to them in a colony. In 2000, Mark Constantine invited Arnoud van den Berg and me to join him in founding The Sound Approach, a continuing project that has already resulted in the pioneering book The Sound Approach to birding (Constantine & The Sound Approach 2006). Teeming bird cliffs, their roar and clamour, and their scent, came to be associated with good times: purple-tongues from eating berries, ducking to avoid bonxie attacks, edging out to have a better look at the puffins. The only petrel I knew (and knew to avoid) was the Northern Fulmar Fulmarus glacialis. The seabirds I grew up with were the bonxies, kittiwakes, guillemots, tysties, and puffins of the Orkney cliffs and shores. My mother came from Orkney, Scotland, and we visited family and friends there every summer throughout my childhood. It struggles a bit, a camera flashes, and then the creature is released into its burrow. Warmly dressed people, torches in hand, crowd round a fascinating little dark bird one of them holds by the legs. I pictured a dark night on a steep boulder-field. One of the most dreamlike was the night my parents joined a ringer working in the Leach’s Storm Petrel Oceanodroma leucorhoa colony of Carn Mór. 34 years later, my mother and father met when they both volunteered for a program to restore the village buildings.īefore my first visit, I had vivid images of St Kilda in my mind’s eye, born of their stories, maybe some photographs I once saw, and mingled with what I had learned about such places. The only settlement, Village Bay on Hirta, was evacuated in 1930, when the inhabitants realised that life could be easier elsewhere. I owe my existence to St Kilda, a remote clump of islands, beyond the Outer Hebrides in Scotland. Swinhoe’s Storm Petrel Oceanodroma monorhis Monteiro’s Storm Petrel Oceanodroma monteiroiĬape Verde Storm Petrel Oceanodroma jabejabe Wilson’s Storm Petrel Oceanites oceanicus Leach’s Storm Petrel Oceanodroma leucorhoa Mediterranean Storm Petrel Hydrobates melitensis White-faced Storm Petrel Pelagodroma marinaīritish Storm Petrel Hydrobates pelagicus Scopoli’s Shearwater Calonectris diomedeaĬape Verde Shearwater Calonectris edwardsiiīalearic Shearwater Puffinus mauretanicus
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