Sooty Shearwater
No-one knows how many sooty shearwaters breed in New Zealand waters, but there are probably tens of millions of birds in the population. They are likely to be the most common seabird in the world. Knowing this, it is not difficult to see why the species dominates the birdlife in parts of the North Pacific when the entire population migrates there in the southern winter. Its sheer numbers and its habit of diving for food explain why more sooty shearwaters
than any other species are killed by the North Pacific drift nets. The total annual mortality in these nets, which is in the high hundreds of thousands, is estimated to be 1 — 5 percent of the total population. The sizes of most sooty shearwater populations have never been surveyed and our best hope of determining population changes may be from the memories of muttonbirders who annually harvest the shearwater’s young on some islands around Stewart Island.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/FORBI19901101.2.25
Bibliographic details
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Forest and Bird, Volume 21, Issue 4, 1 November 1990, Page 30
Word count
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158Sooty Shearwater Forest and Bird, Volume 21, Issue 4, 1 November 1990, Page 30
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