Over three seasons, the breeding success of storm petrels nesting in boxes averaged 2.9 times greater than that of birds at natural sites, despite their likely reproductive inexperience.
Conservation management might increase the populations of cormorants but consequently reduce the availability of breeding sites for storm petrels.
There is little information available about how emperors disperse and recruit, but given the vulnerability of their fast ice breeding habitat to storm action, breeding pairs may move between sites and juveniles may recruit to other sites rather than to their natal colony.
In the consecutive breeding seasons of 2010 and 2011, 75 and 82 of the study nests, respectively, were occupied by a breeding pair of storm petrels.
Muth said the rebuilt levees ($14.5bn has been spent on upgrades to the flood defence system since Katrina) plus a recent influx of new residents who were not in the city during the 2005 storm risked breeding a sense of complacency that is dangerous given the worsening effects of climate change on the region.
Our study implies that storm petrels breeding in a cave rely on other positional cues than olfactory ones to home and suggests a mechanism combining tactile and proprioceptive cues to find the nest in the dark.
This paper reports on an experiment to increase the availability of secure nest sites at a colony of Madeiran storm petrels breeding on an islet (free from introduced predators) in the Azores islands where there is evidence of inter-specific competition.
A summary of reproductive performance of storm petrels breeding in areas subject to high and low levels of recreational disturbance in the two study years is presented in Table 1.
The breeding colony of the New Zealand storm petrel was not located until February 2013; it had been thought extinct for 150 years until its rediscovery in 2003, while the Bermuda petrel had been considered extinct for nearly 300 years.
It has 60,000 northern gannets, amounting to 24% of the world population, 49,000 breeding pairs of Leach's storm petrel, up to 90% of the European population, 136,000 pairs of puffin and 67,000 northern fulmar pairs, about 30% and 13% of the respective UK totals.
