The Short-tailed Shearwater or Muttonbird is sooty brown in colour, although appears grey. It is a migrating bird. The length is approximately 42cm and its wing span is about 1metre.
You can hear the sounds of a Muttonbird colony on The Generator
Their tube-nose beak excretes more than 90% of the salt taken in with seawater and food. It’s the tube-nose beak's distinctive smell that helps identify partners on their large breeding grounds. They mostly nest around Tasmania and the islands in Bass Straight but also off the southern and south eastern coastline of Australia.
They never visit their nests in daylight, instead they will form rafts out at sea and await dusk before returning to their rookery to feed their chicks. They will travel as far south as the Antarctic for foodLike most birds they are faithful and Loyal and return each year to be with the same mate in that same burrow - for thirty or forty years
The female always lays her single white egg between the 20th Nov and the 2nd December, without fail, regular as clockwork and the male and female alternate the incubation of the egg.
In the 1840’s the Bass Strait Islanders had exterminated all the seals in that region, so they turned their attention to that strange grey bird which appeared on their islands every September. They knew that the bird ate Plankton, Krill and Anchovies, just like whales, so they hoped for good oil. They had a feast on the eggs, plucked the feathers, ate the flesh..
However when the islanders tasted the adult Shearwater it tasted like old mutton - hence the name Mutton Bird, but when they tried the younger bird its flavour was unique, it tasted neither like fish nor fowl.
The fledgling Mutton birds are 'commercially harvested' between March and April each year and up to 600,000 birds are killed. Just as well it is Australia’s most prolific bird.
Their down is used for sleeping bags and pillows, their fat for dairy cattle feed supplement, their oil is used by pharmaceuticals companies and their flesh is for human consumption.
Matthew Flinders sailed through the Bass Straight islands in 1798, he noted that more than one hundred and fifty one millions birds passed over his ship in 1 ½ hrs. And that was one flock. He wrote: “They where 50 to 80 yards in depth and 300 yards or more in breath. The birds were not scattered but flying as compactly as free movement would allow. During a full one and a half hours this stream of birds continued to pass without interruption and with the swiftness of a pigeon.”
At the end of the breeding season, adults and the immatures leave their nests. They head towards New Zealand then northward, eventually reaching the North Pacific where they spend the Australian winter. Young birds may remain in the north for their first year but the adults return along the west coast of North America then turn southwest. They arrive on the east coast of Australia, having navigated a figure-eight path around the Pacific. From the east coast, the Muttonbirds head south to their breeding islands. Many die along the way of starvation and exhaustion and are washed up along the NSW beaches.
In 1957, a young bird banded in the Bass Strait was killed by an Eskimo in the Bering Sea (off the north coast of Alaska) having flown 15,000 kilometres - 15,000 kilometres in less than a month. And that was the bird's first flight.
Think about the incredible journey that mutton bird has undergone when next you see one lying dead and half covered with sand on your south coast beach.
http://www.ozbird.com/muttonbirds.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-tailed_Shearwater
