WatchList Species Account for Tristram’s Storm-Petrel (Oceanodroma tristrami)

Qualifies for the list as a Red List Species

Photo: USGS/Ian L. Jones

Tristram’s Storm-Petrel, the largest of the storm-petrels, breeds only in the remote and inaccessible northwestern Hawaiian islands from Nihoa to Midway and also on small islands off the coast of Japan. It nests on cliffs of volcanic islands and on sandy atolls. Information on the bird is sparse, but after breeding it is detected throughout the area between the Hawaiian Archipelago and Japan. It feeds on fish and a variety of marine invertebrates, chiefly crustaceans and small cephalopods, which it captures mostly at night. Little information is available on its behavior. On Midway, populations of the bird were decimated by rats, but the species may return now that the rats have been eliminated. In most of the remote islands of the archipelago, mammalian predators are absent but avian predators such as Laysan Finches and Great Frigatebirds prey on the storm-petrel. On the islands of Japan, feral cats, rats, and crows are a threat. As do many marine birds, it ingests plastic particles but the effects are unknown. This nocturnal bird nests in burrows, but little information is available on its breeding behavior. In the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands the population was estimated in 1984 at 21,740, with larger numbers in the Japanese islands, where the estimate is in the tens of thousands of birds.