Standing on the golden limestone cliffs that were once the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, I paused to appreciate these sheer vertical forms on the island of Gozo in Malta in later summer this year. Metres away Birdlife Malta ’s seabird scientists Dr Ben Metzger (head of seabird research – you can find out more about the fantastic seabird project here.) and Paulo Lago Barreiro were showing myself and Caroline Rance (also Birdlife Malta ) how to look for signs of something very special living here. We could see some splashes of poo and a few white feathers; kneeling down on the hard, crusty rocks we peered with torches into a shallow burrow that had been scarped out beneath a huge boulder. At the end in a larger space a large ball of fluff shuffled and revealed a glistening eye and beak. This was a seabird, a baby in fact, belonging to the Scopoli’s Shearwater, a crow-size seabird that when adult has long, straight wings for gliding long distances across the sea. In Malta , 5% of the world’s population of Scopoli’s shearwater nest here, and globally the species only breeds here in the Mediterranean .
Carefully bringing the chick out, we placed a metal identification ring (more info. on seabird ringing here) on the leg of the bird, measured its growing wings, and took its weight before tucking it back inside its nest. We had the chance to admire its tubenose bill; their nostrils extend out along two short tubes on top of their beak and help the shearwaters smell food tens or even hundreds of miles away, in particular squid, fishes, and perhaps even dead dolphins.
In a few months time this chick would be ‘shearing’ the waves and heading for the Atlantic Ocean where it winters off the coast of Africa [b1] . That evening, as the light faded, we scrambled down the rocks that during the day most would faint at if they went anywhere near the edge! We found another eight or nine chicks that we tagged with leg rings, plus a few adults as they returned under the cover of darkness to feed their chicks. Despite the bright moon these adult birds were keen to return. As luck would have it we re-caught a female shearwater [BB2] [b3] that Ben and Paulo had spent many nights that week trying to recapture! She was special because on her back was a device that had been recording and tracking her movements out at sea. We couldn’t wait to discover where she had been over the past month since the Global Positioning System (GPS) tracker had been put on her. We weren’t disappointed – she had been all the way to Italy spending a lot of time flying up a down the sea between the north-east of Malta and Italy. She then circled right round the islands of Malta , reaching right out into the Mediterranean Sea towards Tunisia , south of Lampedusa, the largest of the Italian Pelagic islands, before heading back north. This information had suddenly transformed out knowledge and understanding of this bird, and this species, in a split second!
——————————————————————————————————————————————————
Ed is a freelance naturalist enabling others to enjoy and discover the natural world. He takes people around the world watching wildlife from the Arctic to