Wednesday, January 03, 2007
Chilean Fjords, At Sea, and Straits of Magellan
I had already snoozed the phone twice (automatic wake-up calls) but the third time the phone chimed, it was Chef Stefan to let me know there was a bird up on Deck 10 at the ice cream station. That’s indoors! I made myself presentable as fast as I could and grabbed a camera, bird book, and gloves and a towel in case it was large. I had forgotten to ask. Last time this happened it was an albatross.
The guy at the ice cream station didn’t know anything about a bird. I found Stefan at the door to the open pool deck, and two waitresses were there too. They were very concerned and led me outside (thank goodness) to an alcove opposite a self-serve coffee station. One of them moved a trash can, revealing a small dark bird wedged under the bottom of the wall’s façade. It was tricky getting the little guy out of its nook but luckily the hollow only went a couple inches up, so it couldn’t get lost in the wall.
As soon as I had it in my hand I knew it was a diving-petrel even though I’d only seen them in photographs. There are only four species in the family, all in the Southern Ocean. They are a lot like murrelets in the Northern Hemisphere, small diving birds that use their wings underwater in pursuit of prey.
I gave it a quick physical exam. It was in fine shape, just scared, no broken bones or oil on its feathers. Its plumage was incredible: deep, soft, and cushiony. What a tiny bird it must be underneath that dense feather coat. It had the most beautiful bill. It was black and sculpted, with wide buttresses along the jawline. The nares (nostrils) are in tubes like other petrels, but point upward instead of forward. Its black eyes were rather large and very alert, and its little gray feet were webbed and had dainty claws.
The staff helped me take some photographs and then opened a downwind window. I was pretty sure the bird would be fine, but it still takes some nerve to throw a tiny bird off the deck seventy feet up. I gave it a good toss to get it away from the ship and it quickly straightened itself out and got its wings going. It was a bit shaky at first but soon was buzzing away on those stubby little wings and out of sight. I hoped I hadn’t messed up its feathers too much in the handling.
My bird books revealed that it was probably a Common Diving-petrel by its coloration, but I wish I’d known beforehand that differences in the nostrils are the diagnostic character for distinguishing birds in the hand. The snapshots we got of the struggling bird were okay, but the bill is blurred in all of them. I want to get better at photographing birds in hand, and maybe next time get one of the ship’s photographers to come document the rescue. I’m always so anxious to let the bird go as soon as possible that I don’t want to stress it out by making it pose too much. But here in the Southern Ocean, there is little data about most of these species, and good photographs can make useful records out of these unfortunate landings.
Who knows how long the poor thing had been hiding there. It probably landed on the ship at night, confused by our lights. When I found the bird we were at the southern edge of its known range, perhaps even south of it. I hope it finds its way back to where it came from, and if it’s feeding chicks, I hope its not gone too long.
A little while after I let the bird go we sailed out into the open sea from the morning’s protected fjords, and boy, the Roaring Forties were doing their thing. We had winds gusting up to 45 knots and seas as high as 25 feet (my guess, and some of them were bigger). A couple times the ship leaned over and in my room I heard a sound like a hollow drum being smacked with a bat. I think it was the stabilizers coming out of the water.
It was fantastic seabird weather. After my glacier presentation at 1:30 I had a good crowd looking for birds (and tips on which penguin colony to visit), and we were treated to large numbers of prions zipping like charged particles over the huge waves. These are silvery or gray-blue birds the size of pigeons that fly so close to the surface and so fast that it’s barely believable. The massive wave peaks were thousands of times more massive than the birds yet they flitted about as if over flat calm.
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