08/06/2026
There’s a storm brewing - David Steel - NatureScot blog repost
Friday 5th June comments: Our long-term volunteer has been helping with the monitoring of Storm Petrels on the island and here is her story…
Can we hear the Stormies sing? What arrives in the dark, sounds like (apparently) a sick fairy and breeds in burrows? A European Storm Petrel!
Following the discovery of nesting Storm Petrels on the island in 2019, the search to find more continues. Opposite me now, the assistant manager Tam is absorbed in scrolling through sound recordings. Tam is craning to hear a very particular call. Renowned for its mystery and strangeness, the Storm Petrel is the smallest seabird in the Atlantic and looks like a pigeon that’s been transformed for a life at sea. It’s a night-flying burrow-nesting bird that utilizes only the most remote islands, leaving many researchers ‘in the dark’ about much of its life. Amazingly, breeding Storm Petrels were recorded for the first time on the Isle of May in 2019. This is the first record of breeding storm petrels on the east coast of Britain south of the Pentland Firth and Orkney islands! This forced the team in 2021 to ask whether they had been missing the stormies?
The Hunt As if in a Roald Dahl novel, NatureScot working with other groups unleashed all manner of techniques to find stormies. Play-back surveys (playing their song and listening for a response) and there was searching with infra-red cameras and thermal binoculars. My favourite method was shipping sniffer dogs over from the mainland to smell for any storm petrel burrows. Unfortunately, false positives were an issue for the dogs. Often after a burrow had been identified as a potential nest, it would be checked with long endoscope cameras and by playing calls to see if the bird responded. As you can imagine, there were a range of challenges and successes. One success being four chicks found in 2024!
What now? Unfortunately we won’t be getting an island sniffer dog. Instead we are putting out PAM (passive acoustic monitoring devices) across the island in suitable storm petrel breeding habitat to record at night and hopefully pick up the characteristic call or song. We will rotate the Audiomoths all around the island helping to determine where the storm petrels are present or not….. You can see a sonograph from a recording above, exhibiting what a petrel song and call looks like as an image. The hunt for more Storm Petrels on the island continues!
