Lynn Kidd puzzles over the dying bird in front of her.
She has never seen anything like it, certainly not around the West Australian seaside town of Esperance, where she has worked as a wildlife carer for the past 11 years.
It was brought to her by a member of the public, who found it waddling "as if it were drunk" on the beach at Wylie Bay, to the east of town.
Still scratching her head, Ms Kidd sends photos to a seabird expert in Albany, who says she is right to be confused.
"[The expert said], 'Wow. The bird is not from here,'" Ms Kidd said.
"It's what they call the Westland petrel."
The Westland petrel spends most of its life at sea, migrating between South America and New Zealand.
It hardly ever sets foot on land.
The bird does travel to Tasmania and Australia's east coast, but it has never before been recorded in WA.
The question over how it ended up so far off course remains a mystery, but it is one the state's museum is keen to investigate.
'Get him into the freezer'
Ms Kidd kept the bird alive for four days after it was found.
It weighed 580 grams — less than half of what it should.
"The Saturday morning, we got up to feed him. We found he'd passed in the night," Ms Kidd said.
"I then got instructed … that I need to get him into the freezer immediately."
Word of the lost bird had reached the WA Museum and it wanted to ensure the body was preserved.
Acting curator of ornithology Kenny Travouillon said the museum was determined to document any bird found outside its usual range, a group it termed "vagrants".
"It happens all the time with birds, more than any other type of animals," he said.
"Because they can fly, they can get other places.
"So we have a whole list of vagrants in Western Australia, of birds that don't occur in Western Australia usually, but occasionally end up here.
"This is the first time we have this species coming to Western Australia."
Taxidermy required
Dr Travouillon said it was important to document vagrants because if more arrived it could trigger the need for new research into anything from climate change to weather patterns, or more subtle possible influences on the birds' behaviour.
He said the museum seemed to be documenting new vagrants almost every year, but researchers were yet to explain why.
For that reason, Dr Travouillon said, it was important to not only record information about the birds, but to also preserve them.
"Next week a taxidermist will prepare the bird for the collection," he said.
"The bird will be skinned and preserved as a dry specimen, so any future researcher that needs to look at it will be able to look at it."
He said tissue, usually collected from the muscle or liver, would be stored in the freezer as genetic record.
Dr Travouillon said a researcher had already shown interest in sequencing the petrel's DNA.
While the stuffed bird will not be on public display, but rather in a collection only available to researchers, if an exhibition on vagrant birds was held in the future "maybe" it could make a public appearance, the acting curator said.
