Wing runners off Haida Gwaii

Robert Cushman Murphy (1887-1973) was a prominent American ornithologist, particularly well-known for his works on seabirds, including the classic 1936 two-volume Oceanic Birds of South America. But he also carried out research on other ornithological topics, writing many books and over 600 scientific papers! For all that effort, he only got one bird named after him – Murphy’s Petrel. He had described it in 1947 as a new species, Pterodroma ultima, making this species a relatively recent addition to the world’s avifauna, and he was later honoured with its English name.

Pterodroma (from the Greek for “wing runner”) is the genus of “gadfly petrels” and refers to their bounding, arcing flight as if evading gadflies (horseflies). The latin ultima means “farthest” or “last” and almost certainly was a reference to this bird’s extraordinarily remote existence. Murphy’s Petrels breed on some of the most isolated islands on earth — the Pitcairn, Tuamotu, and Austral groups, deep in the central South Pacific — and has one of the greatest foraging ranges of any breeding seabird. Murphy was known for his poetic and evocative Latin names.

He seems to have been weaving through my life of late. Other than a fish and the petrel, Wikipedia notes that two other things bear his name: Mount Murphy in Antarctica and the Murphy Wall in South Georgia. I didn’t see either of those geographic features when we visited those locations this year but I presume I must have been within shouting distance, more or less! So not surprising I suppose that a Murphy’s Petrel would have recently buzzed me, well out in the Pacific Ocean, about 17 nautical miles west off the coast of BC’s Haida Gwaii.

But I need to take a flap backwards, and explain what I and five other birders were doing bobbing in a zodiac in a two-metre swell, 32 km off the coast. Our naturalist guide on our recent Quest trip to South Georgia and Antarctica was BC’s Kai Bosch. During that trip he was musing about organizing a pelagic trip off Haida Gwaii to see what was out there in the month of May. His big hope was a Pterodroma petrel, of which there are a handful of species extremely rare off Canada. I claimed first dibs on the trip; my zodiac-mates were all expert birders from BC, most of them professional bird tour leaders. 

On May 19 2026, we took off from Sandspit, Haida Gwaii for the 11-hour zodiac trip. Hopes were high for a few albatrosses or shearwaters, interesting Alcids, and dare we say it, a Pterodroma petrel or two. The first major shock was not one albatross but clouds of them around a fishing boat we tracked down. We ended up seeing about 140, mostly Black-footed Albatrosses but also a few Laysan Albatrosses.

Why 17 nautical miles? That is the distance we had to go to get to the edge of the continental shelf, which is always a good spot for birds as cold upwellings bring nutrients up. Seabirds don’t know where the shelf is, several km deep, but they sure have a nose, or a tubenose anyway, for the tiniest specks of food on the surface. It’s only off Haida Gwaii where the shelf can be reached with a relatively short boat trip. With great anticipation we reached the edge of the continental shelf, having already seen two species of jaeger, hundreds of Alcids (mostly Ancient Murrelets and Rhinoceros Auklets but also puffins and others) and hundreds of Red Phalaropes in gorgeous breeding plumage, a shorebird that is as much at home in the middle of the ocean as it is on the Canadian tundra.

Finally Kai let out a shout that a Pterodroma was on the horizon, identified from its flight pattern. Incredibly, it then headed directly towards us, circled the boat, ignoring our profanities, causing one expert to choke on his muffin, and then glided off. In the next few hours, we were amazed to record a total of 11 Murphy’s Petrels, each similarly closing in on the boat, taking a look at us, finding our chum wanting, and vanishing stealthily off to the south. There are only a very few previous Canadian records of this species and unquestionably, nobody had ever seen 10+ in Canadian waters. 

My photos of a few of the pelagic birds we saw are below. See this eBird checklist for great photos of the Murphy’s Petrels and the albatrosses: https://ebird.org/checklist/S342624505.

Why were these birds there? Other than the theory that Murphy’s ghost is pursuing me, the most reasonable response is that so little is known of seabird distributions in this part of the northeast Pacific that – nobody knows. Maybe they are there every spring and future pelagic trips will find them. Or maybe not. My personal speculation is that this year’s extraordinary warming of the Pacific is driving these petrels northward. It is known that in El Niño years, non-breeding pelagic birds tend to be at more northerly latitudes in the Pacific than in La Niña years. As I write this, a massive subsurface warm anomaly is making its way from the western Pacific towards South America. This months-long transfer of heat, driven by a warming planet that has excess warmth to distribute, is pointing towards a Super El Niño this year, perhaps one of the strongest ever on record.

When things can go wrong, they will go wrong (Murphy’s Law), so its worrisome to note that past Super El Niños have had massive impacts on BC’s seabirds, mostly because of disruptions to food availability. A Birds Canada article (https://www.birdscanada.org/marinebird) notes that historically there have been major seabird die-offs in BC within one to six months of significant El Niño events: e.g., Cassin’s Auklets (2014) and Rhinoceros Auklets (2016). An estimated 4 million Common Murres died in 2014-2015 in the Pacific Northwest, after the very warm 2014 in the northern Pacific, caused by a tropical mass of warm water familiarly called “the Blob”. In a span of about six months, roughly half the entire Alaska population was gone, making it the largest documented die-off of a warm-blooded animal in recorded history. I’m worried for BC’s seabirds in 2026/2027.

The Haida Gwaii archipelago constitutes its own ecoregion, the Haida Gwaii Conifer Forests (NA0525). The ecoregion shares a lot of affinities with similar forests in coastal Alaska, northwestern BC, and Vancouver Island, but has been isolated long enough to host endemic subspecies of a number of birds. See my ecoregion text for details. I birded a bit the habitat around Sandspit with my fellow birders. Of note is that we heard the distinctive endemic subspecies of Northern Saw-whet Owl but unfortunately did not see it. I was happy to find a Red Knot on the shore, a good find — my first in Canada and my 400th species for the country. That was an unimaginable milestone when I started birding in Thunder Bay a half-century ago. As a teenager, I started putting names to a few common birds in 1973, the year of Murphy’s death!