The white-faced storm-petrel’s ability to ‘walk on water’ has earned it that colloquial name of the ‘Jesus-bird’. These small 50-gram seabirds have long legs and webbed feet, which allow them to bounce, ‘pogo-hop’ style off the surface of the sea. In fact, they use their legs a lot, propelling themselves forward with wings outstretched to provide uplift. They can also fly low and fast, flapping their wings, but often using wind flow over waves to their advantage. We also see them diving – but only shallow dives – quick ‘duck-dives’ to grab morsels.Storm-petrels are amongst the smallest of the seabird family of petrels, seemingly fragile, but able to survive in the harshest of conditions of the open sea. White-faced storm-petrels breed in several rat-free places in the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park, with the biggest colonies on the Mokohinau and Aldermen (Ruamaahua) Islands, where there are several thousand breeding pairs, and small colonies on the Noises and islands off Whitianga (Coromandel). They nest in small, shallow burrows in low vegetation, sometimes in forest. Their breeding season is from September through to late February, after which they start to leave Gulf waters and, despite their small size and strange ‘flight’, migrate all the way across the Pacific to the waters of South America.
I have seen them mid-ocean on a voyage from Pitcairn Islands to New Zealand. There they were, bounding, using the wind to lift them in arcing flight, looking very much at home with albatrosses and other migrating petrels. Storm-petrels have an extremely acute sense of smell, more so than shearwaters and other petrels, allowing them to home in on potential prey – mostly planktonic (crustaceans including krill, and fish larvae and eggs). While their preference for foraging areas is away from the mainland amongst the outer islands of the Gulf and towards the continental shelf edge, during the summer they can come quite close to places such as Cape Rodney, Tokatu Point (Tawharanui) and Tiritiri Matangi. Look out for these little guys next time you’re out on the water!
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