The Storm-petrels

The definitive work on the European Storm-petrel and its relatives, by one of the world's leading experts on the species.

Imagine a bird as small as a sparrow, which lives most of its life on the open ocean yet can survive for decades. It walks on the water and migrates halfway around the world, returning to remote islands to breed underground, often in exactly the same rock crevice each year. To attract a mate, it sings like a fairy and smells aromatic, but it vomits oil onto its enemies. It visits its nest by night, lays a single enormous egg, and feeds its chick until the nestling weighs more than both its parents put together. It seems to have little fear of humans but was itself sometimes feared by ancient seafarers.

This might sound like the stuff of legend, but is actually the description of a real creature: the European Storm Petrel, walker on water, shadow in the night, global wanderer, climate sentinel, and open-ocean survivor.

Few people other than offshore fishermen and keen bird-watchers have seen or even heard of them, yet storm-petrels are relatively abundant birds, and one of the most surprising and endearing of our native European species.

The Storm-petrels, the latest in the Poyser series, follows the remarkable life of the European Storm-petrel, from the remote North Atlantic islands where they breed, via the coasts of Africa, to the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean where they spend the northern winter. Along the way there’s coverage of the other members of the storm-petrel family; we learn about their evolution, behaviour, ecology, and adaptations to a life in the harsh and unpredictable environment of the open ocean, and discover what these enigmatic seabirds can tell us about what humans are doing to our planet.