Birds and Birding's Guide to:

Watching THE ALBATROSSES AND PETRELS

Fulmar Species

This species is widely distributed throughout the southern seas, occasionally wandering north on the Pacific coast of America as far as Oregon, as its power of flight is nearly if not quite equal to that of the Albatrosses. It is known to the whalers as the”Nelly,”"Breakbones,”or”Stinker,”the latter name from its habit of vomiting the foul contents of its stomach, often to a distance of several feet, when approached or wounded.

It nests in the same places as the Albatrosses, laying a single large dirty white egg on the bare ground. Its food consists largely when procurable of the blubber and flesh of the seals, sea-elephants, and whales, that are killed for commercial purposes, and, when occasion presents, of the bodies of its feathered relatives. Kidder found them abundant on Kerguelen Island, feeding on the carcass of the sea-elephant.”With their huge whitish beaks, light-colored heads (then covered with clotted blood), and disordered dun plumage, they reminded me strongly of Vultures. Like Vultures, also, they had so crammed themselves that they were unable to rise from the ground. They waddled and stumbled to the sea, swam away, and did not rise into the air until half an hour or more of digestion, and perhaps of vomiting, had made it possible.”They were also observed eating carrion, and were altogether the filthiest birds on the island.

The Fulmar Petrels (Fulmarus), of which there are some four or five forms, take the place in the Northern Hemisphere that the Giant Fulmar fills in the southern seas. They are similar to their great relative, but are distinguished at once by their smaller size, none of them exceeding twenty inches in length, by having the bill shorter instead of longer than the tarsus, by the relatively shorter and smaller nasal tubes, and a tail of only fourteen feathers.

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