Boat provides port in a storm for petrel

Storm petrels were feared to be extinct.

The arrival of a small seabird in the cabin of a fishing boat may be final proof that New Zealand's storm petrel really has returned from the dead.

Fisherman Geordie Murman was about to tuck into his lasagne dinner on Friday night aboard his boat anchored off Little Barrier Island in the Hauraki Gulf when a small black and white bird flew into the cabin.

As a former employee of the old Wildlife Service (now the Department of Conservation) Mr Murman knew immediately the significance of his feathered guest. He put the bird in a box and waited for Department of Conservation staff from nearby Great Barrier Island to identify it.

The island's biodiversity manager, Richard Griffiths, and ornithologist Karen Baird, of Kiwi Wildlife Tours based at Warkworth, both agreed the bird was the same as that photographed off Whitianga and Little Barrier in 2003, the first sighting of the storm petrel for at least 100 years.

Wellington-based DoC seabird expert Graeme Taylor said: "Out of all the crayfish boats, it lands on Geordie Murman's."

Mr Murman was the first person to find the burrow of one of the world's rarest seabirds, the Chatham Island taiko.

A DNA sample from the petrel would now be compared to specimens caught in the 1800s and held in museums in London and Paris to satisfy the NZ Ornithological Society's rare birds committee, which had said that photos of the petrel taken in 2003 were inconclusive.