Short-tailed Shearwater? (September, Monterey Bay, California) (1 Viewer)

Here is the second of a bunch of 4 questions on shearwaters identification.

Can you confirm that this birds are short-tailed shearwaters?

Maybe someone can confirm these as Short-tailed Shearwaters, but not me. Short-tailed are very rare in California in September, and I do not see anything here that eliminates Sooty Shearwater.

It looks like one but i have no in real life experience with them. The bill looks small, the head round, and I am not sure if this is a field mark or not, but i googled pictures of both sooty and short-tailed and it appears in my limited searching that the short-tailed primary coverts are about 1/2 the length of the primaries whereas on sooty it is more like 1/3. this pic you provided looks like the primaries are shorter and more in line with short-tailed, but again i do not even know if that is true about them, just my own reckoning using google.

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I'll leave my original post up, but another look and I am really not sure. pic one and 2 show different angles and give me different impressions. pic 1 looks ok for short-tailed pic 2 looks like sooty to me. I just don't know.

thfranc said:

Here is the second of a bunch of 4 questions on shearwaters identification.

Can you confirm that this birds are short-tailed shearwaters?

Click to expand...

Yes, I would say these are spot on for Short-tailed, a bird I am very familiar with from annual spring migration off the west Peninsular Malaysia coast. The head and bill shape are distinctively different from Sooty, which is a species I have looked for repeatedly here without success!

Thank you very much rkj, Tom and Dave for your answers and for the time you have spent for me.

Dave B said:

Yes, I would say these are spot on for Short-tailed, a bird I am very familiar with from annual spring migration off the west Peninsular Malaysia coast. The head and bill shape are distinctively different from Sooty, which is a species I have looked for repeatedly here without success!

Click to expand...

There are only a handful of records of Short-tailed Shearwaters in September in the Monterey area in the last 10 years. If this was recorded the same date (5 September) as the Sooty Shearwaters in your other post, I think this matches the earliest date ever. I encourage you to report it to report it to the people who keep records there: http://creagrus.home.montereybay.com/