page_title: Sooty shearwater
section_title: Distribution and movements
hierarchical_section_title: Sooty shearwater / Distribution and movements
caption_attribution_description: Puffinus griseus English: A Sooty Shearwater near Avila Beach, California, USA.
context_page_description: The sooty shearwater is a medium-large shearwater in the seabird family Procellariidae. Ardenna was first used to refer to a seabird by Italian naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi in 1603, and grisea is medieval Latin for "grey".
  In New Zealand, it is also known by its Māori name tītī, and as muttonbird, like its relatives the wedge-tailed shearwater and the Australian short-tailed shearwater.
  It appears to be particularly closely related to the great shearwater and the short-tailed shearwater, all blunt-tailed, black-billed species, but its precise relationships are obscure. In any case, these three species are among the larger species of shearwaters that have been moved into a separate genus Ardenna based on a phylogenetic analysis of mitochondrial DNA.
context_section_description: Sooty shearwaters breed on small islands in the south Pacific and south Atlantic Oceans, mainly around New Zealand, the Falkland Islands, Tierra del Fuego, and in the Auckland Islands and Phillip Island off Norfolk Island. They start breeding in October, and incubate their young for about 54 days. Once the chick hatches, the parents raise their chick for 86 to 109 days.
  They are spectacular long-distance migrants, following a circular route, traveling north up the western side of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans at the end of the nesting season in March–May, reaching subarctic waters in June–July, where they cross from west to east, then return south down the eastern side of the oceans in September–October, reaching to the breeding colonies in November. They do not migrate as a flock, but rather as individuals, associating only opportunistically; in June 1906, for example, two were shot near Guadalupe Island off Baja California, Mexico, several weeks before the bulk of the population would pass by. Likewise, the identity of numerous large, dark shearwaters observed in October 2004 off Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands remain enigmatic; they might have been either sooty or short-tailed shearwaters, but neither species is generally held to pass through this region at that time.
  In the Atlantic Ocean, they cover distances in excess of 14,000 km (8,700 mi) from their breeding colony on the Falkland Islands (52°S 60°W) north to 60 to 70°N in the North Atlantic Ocean off north Norway; distances covered in the Pacific are similar or larger; although the Pacific Ocean colonies are not quite so far south, at 35 to 50°S off New Zealand, and moving north to the Aleutian Islands, the longitudinal width of the ocean makes longer migrations necessary. Recent tagging experiments have shown that birds breeding in New Zealand may travel 74,000 km in a year, reaching Japan, Alaska, and California, averaging more than 500 km per day.
  In Great Britain, they move south in late August and September; with strong north and north-west winds, they may occasionally become "trapped" in the shallow, largely enclosed North Sea, and heavy passages may be seen flying back north up the British east coast as they retrace their path back to the Atlantic over northern Scotland.
caption: Upper body of a bird swimming off the shore of California
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