Team solves Swinhoe's storm petrel mystery

Chinese researchers find out more about bird's foraging habits

"High above the silvery ocean winds are gathering the storm clouds, and between the clouds and ocean proudly wheels the Stormy Petrel, like a streak of sable lightning."

Many Chinese people know the line from The Song of the Stormy Petrel, by Russian writer Maxim Gorky (1868-1936), because it has been in the textbooks of Chinese junior high school students for many years.

However, few of us have seen a storm petrel with our own eyes — even though it is a group of nearly 30 species of seabirds in two families that are widely distributed around the world, and some of the species, including Swinhoe's storm petrel, live around China's coastal areas.

A small seabird with a size similar to that of a starling or shrike, the Swinhoe's storm petrel (Hydrobates monorhis) breeds on small islands in the Northwest Pacific, including the Russian Far East, the Korean Peninsula, China and Japan. It has long been considered a mysterious bird because it spends a lot of time out on the open sea and usually returns to land under the cover of darkness.

Technological limitations, such as the weight of tracking equipment and low spatial resolution, have also hindered people's ability to research the species.

But thanks to a pioneering study conducted by Professor Liu Yang's team from the School of Ecology at Sun Yat-sen University in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, in collaboration with the Qingdao Bird Watching Society, more has been learned about the bird.