Far From Land The Mysterious Lives of Seabirds

introdUction to the world’s seabirds | 19

Believed extinct for over a century, the New Zealand Storm- petrel

was re- discovered in 2003. Subsequently, radio- tracked birds

led scientists to a colony near Auckland.

a transmitter weighing two- thirds of a gram, the released birds then led
the searchers in 2013 to nesting burrows in the rainforests of Little Bar-
rier Island, a mere 50 km from Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city.^13
Other techniques may bear future fruit in the search for breeding
sites of other species whose colonies remain unknown. For example
thermal imaging and radar have helped pinpoint nesting areas of the
Black- capped Petrel in the mountains of Hispaniola, and given hope
that the species, long thought extinguished from the Caribbean island
of Dominica, still breeds there. Drones carrying a thermal- imaging cam-
era may contribute to identifying the whereabouts of Marbled Mur-
relets nesting under the dense canopy of the old-growth forest running
along the western seaboard of North America.
The overall impacts of VHF radio- telemetry and radar have been
slight compared to what has been learnt from satellite telemetry! The
first successful deployment of satellite transmitters (on any bird) was
achieved by Pierre Jouventin and Henri Weimerskirch in 1989.^14 They
attached 180 g devices to male Wandering Albatrosses breeding on the