Rhinoceros Auklet
Chris Packham presents the rhinoceros auklet found near the North American western seaboard.
Tweet of the Day is the voice of birds and our relationship with them, from around the world.
Chris Packham presents the rhinoceros auklet found around the North American western seaboard. Rhinoceros auklets are auks. They look very different to their relatives the puffins or guillemots. They're dark grey-ish brown birds, and in the breeding season both male and female have flowing white plumes above their eyes and behind their orange bills. It is the white vertical plate at the base of its bill which has inspired the birds' common names of "horn-billed puffins" or "unicorn puffins". This horn is only grown in the breeding season; the birds shed it in autumn when they head out to sea. Rhinoceros auklets in burrows or cavities in grassy places or on forest floors: most colonies are small, but some contain a hundred thousand birds which produce a soothing chorus of mooing and grunting sounds, strange to hear in the blackness of a coastal wood.
Producer : Andrew Dawes
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Rhinoceros auklet (Cerorhinca monocerata)
Webpage image courtesy of Gerrit Vyn / naturepl.com
NPL Ref Β© Gerrit Vyn / naturepl.com
Two recordings of rhinoceros auklet by Thomas G Sander / Ref: ML110904 & ML110911
This programme contains two wildtrack recording of the rhinoceros auklet kindly provided by The Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology: both tracks were recorded by Thomas G Sander as follows...
- Recorded 26 Jul 1986, at Rabbit Cave, SE Farallon Islands, California, USA
- RecordedΜύ27 Jul 1986, at Rabbit Cave, SE Farallon Islands, California, USA
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