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Have you seen a Manx Shearwater (Puffinus puffinus)?
I’ve seen one in nature
I’ve seen one in captivity
I’ve only seen a dead one/a taxidermy
I don’t know if I’ve seen one in person
I’ve only seen photos, never seen in person
I’ve never heard of this animal
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Manx Shearwater (Puffinus puffinus)
© Lee Jones
October 26, 2016 - Manx Shearwater (Puffinus puffinus)
These shearwaters have a large range, spanning most of the Atlantic Ocean. They feed on small fish, squid, and crustaceans. Wintering along the coast of South America and breeding near the British Isles, their migration is one of the longest in the world. One individual was estimated to have traveled over five million miles (eight million kilometers) during its lifetime. Breeding in large colonies on small, largely uninhabited, islands, they build their nests in burrows. Parents only visit the nests at night to avoid predation, traveling hundreds of miles each day to find food for the chicks. They leave the chicks after 60 days and the chicks leave the nest eight or nine days later.
Did you know that Manx Shearwater routinely dived deeper than traditionally assumed, to a mean maximum depth of 31 m and occasionally down to nearly 55 m.
Manx Shearwater at sea by Nathan Fletcher
Shoji et al. 2016. The diving behaviour of the Manx Shearwater Puffinus puffinus. Ibis
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Manx Shearwaters (Puffinus puffinus) feed their chicks almost exclusively fish, so their young are filled up with oils from their diet. For quite some time, this added shearwater chicks to a list of delicacies near the shores of the United Kingdom. Humans have gathered thousands of young birds from their burrows in their island colonies. Shearwaters of both sexes tend to the young, but the colony really comes alive at night, as the calls of the birds reach through the dark. So far, human interaction on the east of the Atlantic hasn’t stopped these birds from creating impressively sized colonies, and from covering a large global range.
Photo credit: Ash Boudrie
Did Star Wars filming on an Irish island harm breeding Manx Shearwaters and European Storm Petrels?
Filming for Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens took place over two weeks during the seabird breeding season on the uninhabited Irish island of Skellig Michael. The island lies 12 km off the coast of County Kelly in south-west Ireland and is aUNESCO World Heritage Cultural Site (since 1996) that was once home to a 6th Century Christian monastery made up of stone “beehive huts” for hermit monks.
Skellig Michael supports breeding colonies of some 10 000 pairs of European Storm Petrel (Hydrobates pelagicus) -10% of the national population- and when last surveyed 738 pairs of Manx Shearwaters (Puffinus puffinus)
Irish Heritage Minister Heather Humphreys granted permission for up to 180 Star Wars cast and crew members to travel to the island to shoot the new film. Storm petrel and shearwater chicks would then still have been in their burrows. Although there seems no definite reports of harm being caused to the island’s seabirds the filming has raised a level of controversy (click here).
Filming for an earlier Star Wars episode also took place on Skellig Michael and plans are now afoot for the dynasty to return to the island for Episode VIII (click here).
Photo: Jerzy Strzelecki - Manx Shearwater fledgling, photograph by Jaclyn Pearson
text by John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 10 January 2016
