40 | Chapter 2
Southern Ocean, the Southern Giant Petrel. Giant petrels have a fierce
hooked bill that can tear open the belly of a seal or penguin. Pair that
bill with a blood- smeared head from which a pale maggot- coloured eye
peers, and it is a rare sentence that contains both ‘giant petrel’ and
‘cute’. Adult Southern Giant Petrels from the Crozets tend to remain
in the southern Indian Ocean outside the breeding season, while juve-
niles are not only consistently further north but disperse all around the
globe in those southern latitudes.^16 Indeed, so extreme is the nomadism
of the juvenile Southern Giant Petrels, that all those studied circum-
navigated Antarctica within three months of leaving their colony.^17 But,
importantly, their more northern distribution puts the juveniles at far
greater risk of encountering a hook streaming behind a tuna long- lining
vessel, of which more anon.
An equally extreme separation is achieved, albeit rather differently,
by the Southern Giant Petrels from a colony in Patagonian Argentina.
Adults persistently use the Argentinian shelf while, within a month of
fledging, young birds have entirely quit the zone of adult activity by
moving northward as far as waters off southern Brazil.^18
While the juvenile Wanderers head east from the French sub- Antarctic
islands, juveniles of two other species breeding on the Crozets, White-
chinned Petrels and Sooty Albatrosses, head north and west to the sub-
tropical waters of the Benguela and Agulhas Currents, respectively
west and east of South Africa. It is very evident that, even at this early
stage in their lives, the young of different species have different target
destinations.
Indeed, the young of the same species from separate colonies can
head to different destinations, even when those colonies are separated
by barely half a day’s flying, at albatross speed. All the world’s Shy Al-
batrosses breed at just three islands off Tasmania, namely Albatross
Island, Pedra Branca and the Mewstone. When monitored by Rachael
Alderman’s team,^19 the tracked fledglings from the first two sites re-
mained in the Great Australian Bight and barely glided west of the
Western/South Australia border in their first three months of indepen-
dence. In contrast, Mewstone birds had a hotspot of activity off Albany
at the extreme south- west of Australia.