page_title: Thick-billed murre
section_title: Distribution
hierarchical_section_title: Thick-billed murre / Distribution
caption_attribution_description: English: Thick-billed Murres on Buldir by Mckenzie Mudge/USFWS.
context_page_description: The thick-billed murre or Brünnich's guillemot is a bird in the auk family. This bird is named after the Danish zoologist Morten Thrane Brünnich. The very deeply black North Pacific subspecies Uria lomvia arra is also called Pallas' murre after its describer. The genus name is from Ancient Greek ouria, a waterbird mentioned by Athenaeus. The species term lomvia is a Swedish word for an auk or diver. The English "guillemot" is from French guillemot probably derived from Guillaume, "William". "Murre" is of uncertain origins, but may imitate the call of the common guillemot.
  Murres have the highest flight cost, for their body size, of any animal.
context_section_description: The thick-billed murre is distributed across the polar and sub-polar regions of the Northern Hemisphere where four subspecies exist; one lives on the Atlantic and Arctic oceans of North America (U. l. lomvia), another on the Pacific coast of North America (U. l. arra), and two others that inhabit the Russian arctic (U.l.eleonorae and U.heckeri).
caption: Adult and chick, Buldir Island, Alaska
exif: {"Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Artist": "McKenzie Mudge", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image ExifOffset": "118", "Thumbnail Compression": "0", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "0", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "302", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "14370", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "664", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "796", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard"}