Oceanodroma monorhis nos Açores

Peter Alfrey, descubridor del enorme potencial que mantiene la pequeña isla de Corvo para los divagantes americanos y autor del artículo para la revista Birding World (Alfrey, P. 2005. American vagrants on the Island of Corvo, Azores, in October 2005. Birding World 18 (11): 465-474) que originó gran revuelo entre los twitchers europeos y que fue el pistoletazo de salida para las futuras visitas durante los meses de septiembre y octubre a esta remota isla, nos manda una breve nota sobre uno de sus últimos descubrimientos: Paíño de Swinhoe.
"Since 2007 we have been carrying out pelagic exploration around the Azores. At first we tried some "wild cat" pelagics around various islands but soon after we have focused attention on the pelagics banks and seamounts. we tried the water off Santa Maria and also the large banks off Pico and Faial including Princess Alice Bank and the Azores Bank. However these banks are rather large and birds could potentially be dispersed over wide areas and we did not really discove anything of too much significance.
Nonetheless we discovered a hitherto unknown colony of Band-rumped Petrels Oceanodroma castro and also relatively large numbers of Wilson's Petrels Oceanites oceanicus in addition to a few Fea/Desertas Petrels. Since 2010 attention has focused around Graciosa as this island also holds the world's population of the recently described Monteiro's Petrel so this also gave an opportunity to observe this species at sea. In addition to studying the Monteiro's Petrel attention also focused in looking for seabird hotspot. Thanks to co-operation with the local fishing community we identified various localities which were prime fishing areas and areas where fishermen had reported seeing good numbers of small black and white birds. Last year we investigated an area called the Bank of Fortune and found good numbers of feeding Monteiro's Petrel and also Wilson's Petrels in addition to some unidentified large skuas. This seemed to be a good areas for Petrels so this year we set out again at a different time of year t the Bak of Fortune and confirmed the reason for it being called the Bank of Fortune by discovering this superb Swinhoe's Petrel.
More information here: Non-Stop Birding
Peter Alfrey"



Fonte:http://www.reservoirbirds.com/News.asp#New_88