Photo: Stephen Rutt
Cory’s Shearwaters Stephen Rutt
Pterodroma I arrived on Madeira in late August. Madeira at the best of times is a humid, muggy place, as Atlantic islands tend to be. It kicks up out of the ocean, 520 km west of Morocco, a perfect volcanic shape rising to 1,800 metres and wreathed in clouds of its own making. It is mostly cloaked in dense laurel forests and away from the beaches it is hard to get a clear view of it, hard to get a handle on what Madeira is, what it looks like beyond green trees and blue sky. It is hard to get a handle too on their Firecrests, a different, duller species than ours, always slipping into the shadows of the tallest, darkest trees. It’s hard to get a handle on their Chaffinches – luridly different with their bright green on the back, salmon pink and grey on the breast – and yet the same species as ours. Things are clearer out to sea. I was on a Wind Birds pelagic, on a RIB, which is best imagined as a boat smaller in every
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direction than you would want, that thumps into every wave with a jarring vigour. We were here for Pterodroma petrels. Pterodroma petrels are birds of myth and mystery: what is not known about them vastly outstrips what is. The English name for the family is the ‘gadfly’ petrel, gadfly defined by my dictionary as “a person who annoys”. Though flippantly truthful, I prefer Pterodroma: ancient Greek for “winged runner”. Both capture the essence of the family: fleeting, elusive, frustrating. Fea’s Petrels were discovered in 1899 by Leonardo Fea. Not long afterwards, Zino’s Petrel was first found, thought to be a version of Fea’s, and lost again. It wasn’t until the 1960s that Paul and Frank Zino rediscovered them breeding on the third highest of the Madeiran peaks, the Pico do Arieiro, where their mournful wailing haunts the high peaks. They sing slightly differently
