Sarah Lagan
Published May 29, 2018 at 8:00 am
(Updated May 29, 2018 at 7:30 am)
A photographer has captured a
photo of a rare visitor to the island — a bird that flew more than 6,500 miles
from the Antarctic.
Fisherman Kevin Winter
photographed the south polar skua which he said was “feeding aggressively
around the boat without fear”.
Skuas are the size of large gulls
and feed by chasing migrating shearwaters and other birds and forcing them to
regurgitate their food.
Mr Winter suggested that as there
were no shearwaters around, the skua, from the South Shetland Islands off
Antarctica, was hungry.
South polar skuas are rarely
spotted in Bermuda and the sighting was particularly unusual as the bird was
tagged on its leg. Mr Winter posted his find on eBird, a database for bird
sightings. Andrew Dobson, president of the Bermuda Audubon Society, saw the
photos and contacted seabird researchers in a bid to find out who tagged the
bird.
Ben Raymond of the Australian
Antarctic Division forwarded the enquiry to French researcher Yan
Ropert-Coudert who passed the query on to colleagues in Europe.
Dr Hans-Ulrich Peter, head of the
Polar and Bird Ecology Group at Friedrich Schiller University in Germany,
replied the bird had been tagged by his researchers.
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