Southport Sea Mount trip 11-14th April 2014.

Hi All, the trip out to the Queensland & Britannia Sea Mounts (our second) last weekend was highly successful. The main aim was again to locate the enigmatic ‘striped bellied’ storm-petrels, which we did successfully. Our view now, after incredibly close views of several birds is that all the sightings thus far in this region have been definitely NOT New Zealand Storm-Petrels, due to several factors. The birds we are seeing here most closely resemble the birds being seen off the southern edge of New Caledonia and loosely referred to as New Caledonian Storm-Petrel. However, with the majority of sightings of these birds being sighted in an area both offshore and along open ocean sea mounts adjacent to Brisbane, down to Ballina in northen New South Wales, in the southern Coral Sea, it has been suggested we use the term Coral Sea Storm-Petrel for the time being. That is until ongoing further studies affirm it’s correct taxonomic status, which obviously is going to take some period of time. I have recorded a total of 38 individuals now for the region. My friend Chris Collins of the UK is conducting a similar expedition off New Caledonia in early May and will be stopping over at my place en route and we will swap notes. The overall trip was also highly interesting, with some mega sightings. Although the overall diversity and numbers were down on 2012, there were still some highly prized sightings. These string of sea mounts, stretching from just offshore of Fraser Island down to just over the New South Wales border are all in Australian territorial waters and are proving to be an extremely important staging/foraging area for a large number of seabird species, some of which have become increasingly rare and threatened! Below is the 2 day list. Red-tailed Tropicbird – 1 White-tailed Tropicbird – 6 (3) Polynesian Storm-Petrel – 1 Wilson’s Storm-Petrel – 110 (32) Coral Sea Storm-Petrel – 25 (7) White-faced Storm-Petrel – 3 (1) Wedge-tailed Shearwater – 288 (40) Flesh-footed Shearwater – 70 (20) Sooty Shearwater – 2 (1) Streaked Shearwater – 1 Tahiti Petrel – 86 (15) Kermadec Petrel – 51 (3) Great-winged Petrel – 47 (12) all gouldi Providence Petrel – 12 (2) Gould’s Petrel – 11 (1) Collared Petrel – 3 (1) Arctic Jaeger – 2 (1) Common Noddy – 2 (1) White Tern – 3 (1) Sooty Tern – 31 (3) Cheers – Paul W. ******************************************************************************** This email, including any attachments sent with it, is confidential and for the sole use of the intended recipient(s). This confidentiality is not waived or lost, if you receive it and you are not the intended recipient(s), or if it is transmitted/received in error. Any unauthorised use, alteration, disclosure, distribution or review of this email is strictly prohibited. The information contained in this email, including any attachment sent with it, may be subject to a statutory duty of confidentiality if it relates to health service matters. If you are not the intended recipient(s), or if you have received this email in error, you are asked to immediately notify the sender by telephone collect on Australia +61 1800 198 175 or by return email. You should also delete this email, and any copies, from your computer system network and destroy any hard copies produced. If not an intended recipient of this email, you must not copy, distribute or take any action(s) that relies on it; any form of disclosure, modification, distribution and/or publication of this email is also prohibited. Although Queensland Health takes all reasonable steps to ensure this email does not contain malicious software, Queensland Health does not accept responsibility for the consequences if any person’s computer inadvertently suffers any disruption to services, loss of information, harm or is infected with a virus, other malicious computer programme or code that may occur as a consequence of receiving this email. Unless stated otherwise, this email represents only the views of the sender and not the views of the Queensland Government. ********************************************************************************** _______________________________________________ Birding-Aus mailing list Birding-Aus@birding-aus.org To change settings or unsubscribe visit: http://birding-aus.org/mailman/listinfo/birding-aus_birding-aus.org