Ancient murrelet
| Ancient murrelet | |
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| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Aves |
| Order: | Charadriiformes |
| Family: | Alcidae |
| Genus: | Synthliboramphus |
| Species: | S. antiquus |
| Binomial name | |
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Synthliboramphus antiquus (Gmelin, 1789) |
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The ancient murrelet (Synthliboramphus antiquus) is a bird in the auk family. The genus name Synthliboramphus is from Ancient Greek sunthlibo, "to compress", and rhamphos, "bill", and antiquus is Latin for ancient. The English term "murrelet" is a diminutive of "murre", a word of uncertain origins, but which may imitate the call of the common guillemot.
It breeds from the Yellow Sea (islands off China), through the Russian Pacific coast and the Aleutian Islands to the Haida Gwaii archipelago of British Columbia, where about half of the world population breeds.
There are two listed subspecies:
These birds breed in colonies, their two eggs (sometimes one) are laid in burrows excavated in forest soil among tree roots, under logs or in grass tussocks, occasionally in rock crevices. These small auks arrive at and depart from their nesting grounds at night, presumably to reduce predation, and perhaps for the same reason the young are never fed at the nest, being taken to sea 1–3 days after hatching. The parents and young recognise one another by call and after the chicks have run from the burrow to the sea, they locate their parents by call and the entire family swims immediately out to sea. The family continues to move away from land for at least twelve hours. After that, the young are fed exclusively at sea by their parents for more than a month. This species spends less time on land than any other bird.
Some ancient murrelets move south in winter as far as California, and odd birds are found inland in North America, carried by autumn storms. The most remarkable record of this relatively short-distance Pacific migrant was a bird found on Lundy, Devon in spring 1990. Even more remarkably, the same bird returned to this British island the following spring.
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Wikipedia