page_title: European storm petrel
section_title: In culture
hierarchical_section_title: European storm petrel / In culture
caption_attribution_description: English: "Mother Carey and her chickens" by John Gerrard Keulemans, 1877. Frame removed by cropping.
context_page_description: The European storm petrel, British storm petrel, or just storm petrel is a seabird in the northern storm petrel family, Hydrobatidae. It is the only member of the genus Hydrobates. The small, square-tailed bird is entirely black except for a broad, white rump and a white band on the under wings, and it has a fluttering, bat-like flight. The large majority of the population breeds on islands off the coasts of Europe, with the greatest numbers in the Faroe Islands, United Kingdom, Ireland, and Iceland. The Mediterranean population is a separate subspecies, but is inseparable at sea from its Atlantic relatives; its strongholds are Filfla Island, Sicily, and the Balearic Islands.
  The storm petrel nests in crevices and burrows, sometimes shared with other seabirds or rabbits, and lays a single white egg, usually on bare soil. The adults share the lengthy incubation and both feed the chick, which is not normally brooded after the first week. This bird is strongly migratory, spending the Northern Hemisphere winter mainly off the coasts of South Africa and Namibia, with some birds stopping in the seas adjoining West Africa, and a few remaining near their Mediterranean breeding islands.
context_section_description: Its association with storms makes the storm petrel a bird of bad omen to mariners; they are said to either foretell or cause bad weather. A more prosaic explanation of their appearance in rough weather is that, like most oceanic seabirds, they rely on the winds to support them in flight and just sit on the water surface when becalmed. The birds were sometimes thought to be the souls of perished sailors, and killing a petrel was believed to bring bad luck. The petrel's reputation led to the old name of witch, although the commonest of the folk names is Mother Carey's chicken, a name also used for storm petrels in general in the UK and North America from at least 1767. This is believed to be a corruption of mater cara (dear mother, the Virgin Mary), a reference to the supernatural Mother Carey, or a superstitious modification of an earlier Mother Mary's chicken to reduce the potency of the religious name. The Mother Carey character appears a number of times in literature. In the Cicely Fox Smith poem "Mother Carey", she calls old sailors to return to the sea, but in John Masefield's poem of the same name she is seen as a wrecker of ships. She appears as a fairy in Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies and is depicted in one of Jessie Willcox Smith's illustrations for the book.
  The association of the storm petrel with turbulent weather has led to its use as a metaphor for revolutionary views, the epithet "stormy petrel" being applied by various authors to characters as disparate as Roman tribune Publius Clodius Pulcher, a Presbyterian minister in the early Carolinas, an Afghan governor, or an Arkansas politician.
  A 1901 poem by Russian writer Maxim Gorky is invariably titled in English as "The Song of the Stormy Petrel", although that may not be a perfectly accurate translation of the Russian title "Песня о Буревестнике", because "Буревестник" (the name of the bird in Russian) translates to the English general term "storm bird". The poem was called "the battle anthem of the revolution", and earned Gorky the nickname "The Storm Petrel of the Revolution".
  Various revolutionary anarchist groups adopted the bird's name, either as a group identifier, as in the Spanish Civil War, or for their publications. The Stormy Petrel (Burevestnik) was the title of the magazine of the Anarchist Communist Federation in Russia around the time of the 1905 revolution, and is still an imprint of the London group of the Anarchist Federation (Britain and Ireland). To honour Gorky and his work, the name Burevestnik was bestowed on a variety of institutions, locations, and products in the USSR.
caption: "Mother Carey and her chickens", a lithograph by J. G. Keulemans, 1877
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