Short-tailed shearwater

Short-tailed shearwater, Slender-billed shearwater
Conservation status
Least Concern (IUCN 3.1)
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Aves
Order:	Procellariiformes
Family:	Procellariidae
Genus:	Puffinus
Species:	P. tenuirostris
Binomial name
Puffinus tenuirostris (Temminck, 1836)

The short-tailed shearwater or slender-billed shearwater (Ardenna tenuirostris; formerly Puffinus tenuirostris), also called yolla or moonbird, and commonly known as the muttonbird in Australia, is the most abundant seabird species in Australian waters, and is one of the few Australian native birds in which the chicks are commercially harvested. It is a migratory species that breeds mainly on small islands in Bass Strait and Tasmania and migrates to the Northern Hemisphere for the boreal summer.

Adult near Burrow on Bruny Island. The photograph was taken at night.

Fledgling, Austins Ferry, Tasmania, Australia

This species appears to be related to the sooty shearwater and the great shearwater, which are also blunt-tailed, black-billed species, but its precise relationships are obscure (Austin, 1996; Austin et al., 2004). These are among the larger species of shearwater, which it is suggested might belong in a separate genus, Ardenna (Penhallurick & Wink, 2004).

Each parent feeds the single chick for 2–3 days and then leaves for up to three weeks in search of food. These foraging trips can cover a distance of 1,500 km (930 mi) and mean the chick may be left unattended for over a week. When the chicks fledge they weigh around 900 g (2 lb), and may be heavier than their parents. In Tasmania, and especially on the muttonbird islands of the Furneaux Group, the chicks are harvested at this time for food and oil. The largest population in the world (2.8 millions of pairs - about 12% of this species) seems to be located on Babel Island. Adult birds foraging for food on the open ocean mistake plastic debris for food and then feed it to their chicks. This ingested plastic, as well as other factors, likely contribute to contamination of chicks. Thousands of Short-tailed shearwater fledglings are attracted to artificial lights during their maiden flights from nests to the open ocean. Fledglings are vulnerable to injury or death by collisions with human infrastructure and once grounded, to predation or becoming road casualties.

Each austral winter, the shearwaters migrate to the seas off the Aleutian Islands and Kamchatka. In the austral spring, they travel down the coast of California before crossing the Pacific back to Australia.

Culinary uses

Being a seabird, the flesh is covered in a considerable quantity of fat, which is normally removed in preparation of the meat before cooking.

When split down the breast and cooked on a barbecue, the resultant meat is red and thick, with a taste reminiscent of a beef steak more than of lamb, with a mild hint of the sea. The texture of the meat is similar to lamb or mutton and hence the name muttonbird.

References

• Austin, Jeremy J. (1996): Molecular Phylogenetics of Puffinus Shearwaters: Preliminary Evidence from Mitochondrial Cytochrome b Gene Sequences. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 6(1): 77–88. doi:10.1006/mpev.1996.0060 (HTML abstract)

Further reading

Identification

Gillson, Greg (2008) Field separation of Sooty and Short-tailed Shearwaters off the west coast of North America Birding 40(2):34-40

External links

• Short-tailed Shearwater Photos
• Parks & Wildlife Service Tasmania: Birds of Tasmania: Short-Tailed Shearwater, Puffinus tenuirostris
• Port Fairy website: Griffiths Island Shearwater Colony
• Annotated List of the Seabirds of the World - Shearwaters