2025 Sooty Shearwater Season: Chick Feeding Time

This video from 6 February shows the 15-day-old chick and how it feeds. The adult bird may have travelled a great distance to bring back the semi-digested crustacean soup that it is regurgitating for the chick. I can’t tell one parent bird from the other, and because the system can only cope with 4 hours of recording per day we can’t be sure of adult comings and goings. The chick is being left alone for up to 3 days at the moment, but sometimes an adult bird arrives every night. They are thought to swap between catching quick feeds locally and flying to the polar front on a long expedition for presumably better-quality food. Note the mites on the adult bird. When the chick is alone it is vulnerable to predation by weka. I don’t know if weka can fit in this burrow and it’s fair to say we haven’t seen any evidence of weka getting a chick on the colony in 12 years.