Birds and Wildlife

I am fortunate enough to spend many months each year visiting some amazing destinations around the world and this page provides links to information about some of my experiences.  This is very much a work in progress and more information and linked pages will be added as and when time allows:

'New Caledonian Storm-petrel' - this fascinating, but sometimes somewhat frustrating, story began in 2008 when a strange streaky storm-petrel, similar to the New Zealand Storm-petrel, was found off New Caledonia during the West Pacific Odyssey.  For further information, a copy of the article which appeared in the July 2013 Birding World magazine, and more photos, click here and if you are interested in coming in 2019 on a follow up expedition, click here.

New Caledonian Band-rumped Storm-petrel sightings - according to references such as Onley and Scofield, the Pacific population of Band-rumped Storm-petrel is only known to occur in the North Pacific with no sightings in south of the equator in the Pacific.  In recent years, however, we have consistently seen birds off the northern end of New Caledonia and in 2013 saw several birds (probably upwards of four individuals) and finally got some reasonable photos of at least one of these.  For further information, click here.

Vanuatu Petrel - initially, this relatively recently described species was only known from a few tide-line corpses but in recent years, the breeding island in the northern Vanuatu archipelago has been found.  I was lucky enough to visit this region with Heritage Expeditions (www.heritage-expeditions.com) in April 2014 and we had some amazing encounters with some incredible views. Click here for more photos, thoughts on identification (or at least separation from White-necked Petrel) and other comments.

Fiji Petrel - another incredibly poorly known species which we saw on the same voyage as the Vanuatu Petrels. Click here for photos and comments.

Indian Ocean Prions - Prions are amongst the trickiest family of seabirds to identify 'in the field' and I was fortunate enough to visit this region with Heritage Expeditions in late 2012.  This gave me the opportunity to photograph hundreds of individuals and click here to be taken to this page.