A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1467 entries
petrel
A petrel is a seabird of the open ocean, related to albatrosses and shearwaters, with paired tubes on top of the bill that drain excess salt taken in with seawater. The storm petrels are the small ones, fluttering low over the surface with their feet trailing and pattering on the water as they pick food off it. Petrels come to land only to breed, usually at night, usually in burrows, on islands with no ground predators.
Etymology
The name is generally read as a diminutive of Peter, for the apostle who walked on water, given by sailors watching the small ones dance across the surface with their feet touching. The reading is old and appears in seventeenth-century writing. The alternative English name, Mother Carey’s chickens, appears to be a sailors’ corruption of a Latin phrase for the Virgin Mary.
Notes
Petrels find food by smell across open ocean, following the scent of a compound released when plankton is grazed, which marks where feeding is happening. They can locate it from many miles downwind. The tube-nosed birds have the largest olfactory bulbs relative to brain size of any bird group, which overturns a long-standing assumption that birds do not use smell much.