Birds

Seabirds

Surrounded by ocean for hundreds of kilometres, Lord Howe Island is a haven for breeding seabirds. Fourteen different species breed each year, in numbers of hundreds of thousands.

Lord Howe Island has some notable features about its seabird populations. It is the only breeding location in the world for the Providence petrel (apart from a few pairs recently discovered on the offshore islands of Norfolk Island); the only breeding location in Australia for the Kermadec petrel and Grey ternlet; the most southerly breeding location in the world for the Sooty tern, Common Noddy, Black noddy and Masked booby; the world’s largest concentration of Red-tailed tropicbirds breeding, and the only breeding population of Flesh-footed shearwaters off Eastern Australia.

Regular visitors

In addition to those birds that breed on the Island, several other species are regular visitors and can be seen on the Island in small numbers each year. These are species of migratory shorebirds that breed in the northern hemisphere around the Arctic Circle and Alaska, and then spend their winter in the southern hemisphere on areas of shoreline on continents and islands.

They include the Eastern Golden Plover, Whimbrel, Ruddy Turnstones, Bar-tailed Godwit, Red-necked stint, Wandering and Grey-tailed tattler. A regular winter visitor is the Double-banded plover from New Zealand.

Rare visitors

A total of 201 species of birds have been recorded on Lord Howe Island, some of these only once, as rare vagrants.

Extinct birds

When discovered, Lord Howe Island had fifteen species of Landbird, of which thirteen were endemic forms. Nine of the original fifteen are now extinct. All these birds had evolved and existed on the Island for many thousands of years without natural predators. But when man came in search of food, and with his domestic animals, they knew no fear and many species were soon exterminated. Two were literally eaten into extinction — the White gallinule (Notornis alba) and the White-throated pigeon (Columba vitensis), while a third, the Red-crowned Parrakeet (Cyanoramphus novaezelandiae subflavescens) was eliminated because it was a pest that damaged fruit and grain crops; all three were extinct by the 1860s.