What Are Pelagic Birds?

A black-browed albatross

 Along the coasts of every continent you will find many types of birds that are adapted to marine life. If you’ve been to the beach you’ve probably spotted birds like gulls, pelicans, and cormorants. While these birds live around the sea, they always stay close to land. However, there are other birds that spend most of their lives hundreds, or even thousands, of miles away from the nearest land. Some of these include albatrosses, petrels, and tropicbirds. These birds are very adapted to life in the open ocean, or the pelagic zone, but how? Let’s find out as we take a look at pelagic birds. 

The pelagic zone is the realm of the sea that is far away from the coast. There are many animals in the pelagic zone that you will not find anywhere near the coast, including the world’s largest animal, the blue whale. Most pelagic birds are found in this realm. However, there are other birds that stay closer to the coast but are considered pelagic because their lives heavily depend on the sea, such as penguins and puffins.

Most pelagic birds spend their time simply gliding above the waves. Their wings are long and thin, enabling them to stay in flight for days or weeks at a time. They even sleep while they’re flying and are able to stay in the air during powerful storms. Because so much of their lives are spent in flight, the bodies of pelagic birds are small in relation to their wings. Large wings and light bodies make soaring through the air an easy task. One example is the magnificent frigatebird, which weighs only three pounds and has a wingspan of 8 feet. This graceful flyer can soar up to four-thousand feet high into the sky. Another example, the wandering albatross, weighs sixteen pounds and has a wingspan of twelve feet, the longest of any bird alive today.

In addition to empowering flight, wings also help the birds catch food. Some, like puffins, use their wings like paddles to help them chase after fish underwater. The northern gannet dives from the sky, retracting its wings in the process. Petrels will fly into waves and come out on the other side. Penguins, on the other hand, have no wings but flippers that help them fly underwater.

Pelagic birds feed on fish, squid, crustaceans, and plankton. However, they still need to drink freshwater to stay hydrated. For this, they have a special gland behind that removes the salt from the seawater they swallow.

Most pelagic birds come ashore for only one reason: to breed. Several will gather together, usually on remote islands or along cliff-lined coasts, in huge groups called colonies to make their nests. The colonies of some species can host up to five-thousand individual birds. The grey-headed albatross breeds on several islands near Antarctica. If a pair has successfully raised a chick one year, it will return to the colony to breed again two years later. Many types of shearwaters are nocturnal at their breeding colonies, and they prefer to nest on moonless nights to reduce the risk of being attacked by predators.

As you can see, different species of pelagic birds are unique in their own way but they all share the same adaptations to life on the high seas.