They were birdwatchers from various parts of Kerala and Karnataka out at sea for two days on a fishing boat off the Azhikkal coast here. For the group of birders who got together as part of an initiative of the Malabar Natural History Society (MNHS) and the Kerala Birder (KB), the excellent weather with calm waters and no winds and the sky a little cloudy at times near the horizon was ideal for watching seabirds.
Their expedition that started in the morning on September 24 concluded in the afternoon on September 25. Unlike in the first pelagic survey conducted by the MNHS and the KB last year as part of their seabird monitoring programme, Flesh-footed Shearwater birds were extremely rare, the birders said. While these were the ones sighted the most last year, only about 10 sightings of the bird were recorded this time, they added.
Jafer Palot, who was among the birdwatchers who participated in the monitoring initiative, said they had many sightings of singles of Jouanin's Petrel. He said that apart from a single wind-blown dead bird that a birdwatcher got from Alappuzha coast in 2010, there had not been any other report of the sighting of the bird from the coast of Kerala. The species is near-threatened and almost endemic to the Arabian Sea, he said, adding that it was known to breed on the island of Socotra located at the extreme western edge of the Arabian Sea.
The birders also sighted Wilson's Storm-petrel further than 40-50km from the coast. Altogether, 50 individual birds of this species were sighted during the trip, J. Praveen and Deepu Karuthedath said in a release. Also sighted was Swinhoe's Storm-petrel. The birders sighted a handful of these birds, some quite close to the coast, they informed.
The seabirds the birdwatchers spotted also include Arctic Skua, Bridled Tern, Sooty Tern, Great Crested Tern, Lesser Crested Tern and Pacific Golden Plover, among others.
The participants of the expedition said the latest pelagic trip recorded more species than the previous one. They also had sightings of two dolphin schools, one very close to the coast, innumerable jelly fish and sea snakes, among others. The other birders who participated in the trip included Anush Shetty, K.G. Bimalnath, Garima Bhatia, E.S. Jayachandran, Malik Fazel, P.P. Sreenivasan, E.S. Praveen, Praveen Neeleswaram, Rajesh Balakrishnan, Rajneesh Suvarna, Raju Sankaran, M.B. Shreeram, Sudheesh Kannan, Sudhir Naik, Sunil Kumar, and Vivek Chandran.
