On September 25, the members of The Bird Watchers of Kerala who undertook a boat trip from Azheekal in Kollam into the deep sea were in for a big surprise. First, they spotted a carcass of a whale “in a highly decomposed state,” recalled Praveen Jayadevan, a scientist with Bird Count India. But the bigger surprise was spotting a flock of Wilson’s Storm Petrels pattering over the water. “There were thousands of birds,” he says, adding, “there’s no documentation of such a large flock. A congregation was spotted earlier off Kannur waters but these numbers were far more than that.”
The group was on a trip called pelagic birding, which allows bird watchers to study birds that live on the waters and come to land only to nest. The group of 30 boarded a fishing trawler early in the morning. “Our aim was to document sea birds,” says C.R. Anoop, a bird watcher and wildlife photographer, undertaking his 11th pelagic trip. They spotted the Storm petrels a little over 30 km into a calm sea off the South Alappuzha coast. “The Storm petrel is a small bird and generally flies solitary or is found in small groups of three to four. It is very rare to see them as a tightly knit flock,” says Anoop.
