The wedge-tailed shearwater may rule the roost on Broughton Island, off Port Stephens, but the seabird has been elusive in giving up many details about its habits.
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![HANDLE WITH CARE: NPWS ranger Susanne Callaghan with a wedge-tailed shearwater on Broughton Island. Picture: Jonathan Carroll HANDLE WITH CARE: NPWS ranger Susanne Callaghan with a wedge-tailed shearwater on Broughton Island. Picture: Jonathan Carroll](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/scott.bevan/dc51ff44-4e0a-4391-a67c-2f8a4e65c990.jpg/r0_0_4250_2824_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
“Because there’s hundreds and thousands of them, they haven’t been the focus of seabird research in the past,” said Susanne Callaghan, a NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service ranger who takes care of the island. “We’ve been learning about other seabirds, we should be learning more about them.”
To try and find out more about the shearwaters, or muttonbirds as they’re commonly called, Ms Callaghan and her colleagues have been on the island attaching data loggers to the birds.
The data loggers have a tracking system to answer questions about the shearwaters’ movements, including where they fly from to nest on the island.
Ms Callaghan said she and her colleagues weren’t sure how far the birds had come, “but a long way is the message”, somewhere in the northern hemisphere.
“That’s one of the many things we’re trying to work out, where they are hanging out post-breeding,” she said.
The rangers attached data loggers to a number of birds last season, but by the time they returned to the island in spring to have their young, they had managed to lose the devices.
So Ms Callaghan is hoping this state-first research project, which includes bird monitoring on three other islands along the NSW coast, will be successfully completed next year.
“There’s a lot of information in a very small chip, but we won’t know anything until the birds return in August, September, October,” Ms Callaghan said.
It is estimated that between spring and late autumn, there are more than 100,000 breeding pairs of the bird on the island, which is part of the Myall Lakes National Park, and neighbouring Little Broughton Island. Large areas are honeycombed with burrows. The shearwaters return to the same burrow each season.
While the small loggers are high-tech, the method of attaching them to the wedge-tailed shearwaters is hands-on. The bird is gently pulled out of the burrow, and the logger is attached to a leg.
So far, 18 have been tagged; the aim is to attach devices to 20 birds.
Get your copy of the Weekender: For more on Broughton Island’s seabirds, read Scott Bevan’s “Call of the Wild” cover story.
![FINE WORK: A data logger is attached to the leg of a wedge-tailed shearwater on Broughton Island. Picture: NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service FINE WORK: A data logger is attached to the leg of a wedge-tailed shearwater on Broughton Island. Picture: NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/scott.bevan/8069c9ea-dcab-4d20-93b2-9a1c21f3d692.jpg/r0_0_3264_1835_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)