Shear fascination

AS a relatively recent convert to pelagic birding, I can vouch that the discipline can be as bewildering as when you first start birding. This is not just because many of the species are head-scratchingly similar but also because the views obtained are often alternately in near-darkness or full glare, your body is batted about by the worst weather Neptune can throw at you and the birds keep disappearing behind the towering swell as it soaks your optics and every item of clothing you’re wearing. Sounds fun, huh?

It’s not for everyone, but once you start to get your eye in, tubenoses in particular are a fascinating, charismatic and characterful group – none more so than the shearwaters, those monochrome stiff-wings that ride the invisible air gradients above the waves like the Silver Surfer rode the cosmos, only more skilfully.

This latest Multimedia

Identification Guide from Bob Flood and Ashley Fisher is the fourth and last projected volume in the series and covers shearwaters and a couple of similar fairly obscure confusion petrels; previous volumes having dealt masterfully with the rest of the Procellariiformes you might see in the Western Palearctic.

The range of species stretches from the familiar in Manx Shearwater to the incredibly unlikely in White-chinned Petrel – though, with one photographed on Orkney in May 2020 (mentioned in the book), it seems almost any seabird can eventually seek harbour in Britain.

If you’re already familiar with this series, you’ll know the fearsome detail it goes into: an overview of the species covered, the idiosyncrasies of their genera and insightful notes on characteristics and jizz; full-length species accounts, with pages on their oceanic dispersal and wanderings, photos from every angle, a distribution map and pinpoint-accurate identification paintings by John Gale, showing all the variation and moult; and a helpfully hefty final section on confusion species and their feather-splitting but essential differences.

Also included in the package is a memory stick with excellent and lengthy footage of all the species in the book, giving you an in situ, verité feel of their flight styles, jizz and features, as well as a taste of the revelatory subtleties of those hard-to-ID species such as Cape Verde and Boyd’s Shearwaters. If I have one minor criticism, it would be that I’d prefer narration rather than subtitles over such informative videos, so I could watch the bird at the same time as absorbing the nuanced verbal ID detail.

Such detailed film and description will also be of great help when seawatching from a headland, where views can be even worse. The book’s jizz, behaviour and plumage detail takes into account lighting, wind conditions and the influence of surrounding birds to provide a holistic view of each species, valuable when trying to judge identification from a shooting speck two miles away, through spray and drizzle. You may not have to let quite so many go unidentified once you’ve combined familiarity with this book with repeated observations.

This book won’t provide you with all the skills needed to be a pelagic ace – only extensive field experience will do that – but it will prime you for most of them and get you up to speed a lot more quickly, giving you a gospel on which to base your trickier identifications. In truth, this whole series is now almost as essential as sea legs and saltines when you’re riding the deck boards. David Callahan