New Seabird Arrivals – A Shift in the Season

Today we travelled out into a rough, bumpy ocean under a strong north-easterly — a howling onshore wind that churned up a short-period sea. It felt like driving down a forgotten gravel road. There were plenty of humpback whales around, though we didn’t see any large concentrations of common dolphins.

The real highlight, though, was the arrival of two pelagic bird species we hadn’t seen all season: the Soft-plumaged Petrel and the Antarctic Prion. Until now, there’d only been a single prion sighting all season — and suddenly, today, there were many, as if they’d arrived in synchrony with some cue known only to them.

These birds are incredibly fast, agile, and challenging to photograph, but we managed to capture a few images — mostly of the prions, with the occasional soft-plumaged petrel sweeping past. It’s a beautiful marker of seasonal change as the Sardine Run continues to unfold.

Antarctic Prions (Pachyptila desolata) breed in staggering numbers on South Georgia, which lies roughly 3,800 km west of Cape Town. This island hosts the world’s largest colony, with over 10 million breeding pairs nesting in dense burrows across the landscape.

Soft-plumaged Petrels (Pterodroma mollis), on the other hand, breed in greatest numbers on Gough Island, located about 2,600 km southwest of Cape Town, where an estimated 1–2 million pairs are found. While both species also nest on other subantarctic islands, these two sites are by far their most significant breeding strongholds.

Their sudden appearance here reminds us how far these birds travel and how tightly tuned they are to oceanic rhythms playing out over thousands of kilometres.