wind and waves | 127the females were the more inclined to continue feeding in worsening
conditions remained unresolved.
Just as wind can cause problems for seabirds, so can rain. A nice ex-
ample comes, unexpectedly, from Antarctica, the earth’s driest conti-
nent.* In late 2013, young downy Adélie Penguin chicks, beginning their
lives in the continent’s French sector, experienced temperatures five
degrees Celsius above normal. Precipitation, normally snow, fell as rain
which drenched the chicks and caused the death of about half of them.^22
Alas, the parents were not in a position to remain with the chicks to
provide shelter. This was because the same weather that brought rain
had failed to clear the ice close to shore. Thus, when foraging for their
chicks, GPS- tracked parents were forced to travel twice the distance
they covered in the previous season and were away at sea for around five
days instead of three.
Without doubt, the weather can at times wreak greater havoc on
seabirds. In particular, prolonged stormy weather can disrupt feeding
opportunities. Weakened seabirds are then blown ashore, sometimes in
huge numbers. In July 2011, the number of prions washed onto New
Zealand’s shores perhaps exceeded one quarter of a million.^23 Such large-
scale strandings of seabirds are called ‘wrecks’. Leading sometimes to
birds being spotted far inland and in the oddest places, wrecks are by no
means confined to the Southern Ocean. They can occur in the North
Pacific affecting, for instance, Cassin’s Auklets. A North Atlantic spe-
cies that is particularly vulnerable is the Little Auk or Dovekie which,
moving south in winter from its breeding strongholds of Svalbard and
Greenland, is frequently wrecked both on the coasts of Europe and the
eastern seaboard of North America, although not necessarily simultane-
ously. In their classic book Seabirds, published in 1954, the pioneer sea-
bird ornithologists, James Fisher and Ronald Lockley, write of Little
Auk wrecks. “When wrecks occur the light, small- winged little birds
turn up in all sorts of places: on reservoirs, lakes, ponds, duck- ponds,
rivers, sewage- farms, flooded gutters; in greenhouses, down chimneys, in
- (^) Annual precipitation along the coast of Antarctica is typically around 200 mm, a little more
than one-third of the annual total outside my Cambridge (UK) window, looking out onto one
of the driest regions of England.