Albatrosses, Petrels and Shearwaters of the World

This is the first comprehensive field guide to the world's 136 species of albatrosses, petrels, shearwaters, storm petrels, and diving petrels. Because many of these birds spend most of their lives far from the coast, traveling from ocean to ocean in a constant search for food, they are poorly known, enigmatic, and often hard to identify in the field. This guide will make field identification much easier. It illustrates every species and shows the distinct plumages of each. It contains 46 high-quality color plates opposite concise descriptions and a color distribution map, with more complete species descriptions following. Species are illustrated on the same page as their confusion species, allowing direct comparisons for more accurate identifications.

This field guide includes information on breeding, feeding, distribution, migration, and conservation. And it illustrates for the first time several extremely rare species, such as Beck's and MacGillivray's Petrels, and the New Zealand Storm-Petrel, which was rediscovered only in 2004.

Seabird watchers will find this an indispensable field guide for use around the world.


A comprehensive guide to all 136 species of open-ocean seabirds, with subspecies and morphs fully illustrated
Designed for field use, with concise information opposite plates, and close- and long-range identification tips
Confusion species included on plates to aid accurate identification
Detailed species accounts, including a color distribution map for each species
Full treatment of recently rediscovered and rarely seen species

Derek Onley is an internationally acclaimed wildlife artist who specializes in seabirds. He has illustrated more than a dozen books, including Field Guide to the Birds of New Zealand. He lives in New Zealand. Paul Scofield is Curator of Vertebrate Zoology at Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, New Zealand. He has been a seabird biologist for more than twenty years and has traveled from the high Arctic to the Antarctic studying seabirds.