where seabirds find food | 157tently heading either north- east or south- east (see page 133). But in com-
parison to the top travellers, gannets do not cover immense distances, a
relatively meagre few hundred kilometres from base. Do species em-
barking on longer journeys obviously commute before feeding?
The answer is yes... sometimes. It is true of the King Penguins vis-
iting the Antarctic Polar Front. It is also true of Indian Yellow- nosed
Albatrosses, satellite- tracked during incubation. They depart volcanic
Amsterdam Island, in the Indian Ocean, and head west for about
1,800 km.^17 That outward trip takes about 30 percent of the trip. They
then spend 40 percent of the trip foraging in the productive waters
south- east of Madagascar. Thus the area where their track is most tor-
tuous, where area- restricted search is evident, is close to where they are
furthest from mate and egg. Then, feeding accomplished, it is time to
return to Amsterdam: the homeward commute takes the residual 30 per-
cent of the trip.
The answer is no... sometimes. Lost in admiration for the mammoth
journeys made by Henderson Island’s Murphy’s Petrels during 20- day
incubation trips (see page 95), I cajoled my RSPB friend Steffen Oppel
to put GPS devices on 10 birds in 2015. As expected, some of the trips
took the birds on immense looping journeys towards the South Ameri-
can mainland. The birds also carried wet/dry sensors on their legs. This
gave analyst Tommy Clay an opportunity to assess whether splash- downs
from flight, presumably essential for food capture, were concentrated at
the outer limits of the journey. They were not. They were distributed
fairly evenly over the trip and so we presumed feeding happened more
or less steadily throughout the entire journey. This was necessarily only
an assumption since Murphy’s Petrels, weighing around 400 g, are too
small to carry devices that record directly when food is swallowed.
More direct evidence of actual feeding events comes from Wandering
Albatrosses tracked from the Crozets archipelago. Bearing satellite
transmitters and stomach temperature sensors, the off- duty incubating
birds studied by Henri Weimerskirch ranged up to 2,000 km from the
archipelago.^18 Each day they ate around two kilogrammes of squid,
snacking throughout the journey, and both by day and night. Although
there appeared to be pulses of eating, perhaps due to squid occurring in