On 25 September, members of The Bird Watchers from Kerala, who took a deep sea boat trip from Azikal in Kollam, were in for a big surprise. First, he saw a carcass of a whale “in a highly decomposed state”, recalls Praveen Jayadevan, a scientist at Bird Count India. But the big surprise was watching a swarm of Wilson Storm petrels patting themselves over the water. “There were thousands of birds,” he says, “there is no document of such a large flock. Earlier a congregation was seen in the Kannur watershed, but the number was much higher.”
The group was on a trip called Pelagic Birding, which allows bird watchers to study birds that live on water and descend only to nest. A group of 30 people boarded a fishing trawler early in the morning. “Our aim was to document sea birds,” says bird watcher and wildlife photographer CR Anoop, who is on his 11th voyage. They spotted Storm Petrel in a calm sea at a distance of 30 km from the South Alappuzha coast. “The storm petrel is a small bird and usually flies solitary or is found in small groups of three to four. It is very rare to see them as tightly woven flocks,” says Anoop.
Wilson’s Storm Petrels feed on floating animal debris, like dead fish.
Praveen, who left the corporate sector last year to start a full-time bird farming, says the bird “does not eat fish for food, but feeds on the debris of floating animals like dead fish. They are one of the most common sea birds and have a large population with an estimated global population of eight to 20 million birds. They breed in the southern oceans, close to Antarctica and migrate to Australia or the Northern Hemisphere during the southern winter (May to August).
Anoop explains that especially the counting of birds on the sea is taken not only with photographs but also by sight. A photograph helps to confirm the identity of the bird, as there are subtle differences between some similar species, for example the Artic skua and the Pomerin skua. It is important to have a photographer and people with binoculars in the group.
Hurricane Petrel of the Missing Swinho
One of the important species absent from the pelagic trip was Swinhoe’s storm petrel that breeds in the North Pacific Ocean, Praveen says. Several individuals of that species had been encountered in all previous pelagic expeditions off the Kerala coast in September. Another voyage conducted on the same day from Kannur saw two Swinho’s Hurricanes Petrel.
“We still don’t know the migration patterns of many of our seabirds, which is why each pelagic trip adds enough new information about our birds”, says Anish Sasidevan, who coordinated the expedition.
Some of the birds seen in the expedition were the Parasitic Jagger (Arctic Skua), Bridle Tern, Little Tern, Common Tern, Great Crested Tern, Lesser Crested Tern, Wilson Storm-Petrel and Flesh-Footed Shearwater.
Praveen Jayadevan has been named a Fellow of the International Ornithologists’ Union