Streaked shearwaters normally fly so low they practically skim the surface of the sea, hence the name, and at low speed. It might have been surprising to track one at an altitude of 4,700 metres at speeds of up to 105mph (169km/h) – except this was during a typhoon that the bird was riding out.
A researcher at Tohoku University has detailed the unusual flight in a paper in the journal Ecology. Kozue Shiomi, who used GPS trackers to follow birds from a small island near Tokyo, observed that when the area was struck by Typhoon Faxai, with wind speeds of more than 120mph, most of them avoided the bad weather.
