![]() ![]() “One of them decided to go all the way to Rockall, which is 600 kilometres to the south, and they go quite far,” Erpur remarked. However, data shows that individuals sometimes travel much farther. The GPS trackers have revealed that the Leach’s petrels in the Westman Islands feed to the west of the archipelago, at the edge of the continental shelf. He compared the petrels’ flight to that of bats, saying they were “mysterious in many ways.” “They only come ashore to the outlying Westman Islands at night, so they are rarely seen anywhere else,” Erpur stated. The three species are related and are all nocturnal. ![]() Results from the miniscule trackers placed on Leach’s petrels and manx shearwaters have already begun to arrive, while data from the storm petrels are expected to arrive later this summer. ![]() “This has never been done in Iceland before, and we are in fact mapping the feeding areas of these species,” explained Erpur Snær Hansen, director of the South Iceland Nature Research Centre. The three species are the manx shearwater (Puffinus puffinus), Leach’s petrel (Oceanodroma leucorrhoa), and the storm petrel (Hydrobates pelagicus), all of which winter in the southern hemisphere – on both sides of the Atlantic. GPS trackers weighing just 0.95 grammes will help scientists track the movements of three species of elusive nocturnal birds that stay in the Westman Islands, South Iceland, for a part of each year, RÚV reports. ![]()
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