In reply to deepsoup:
Thanks for posting a link to this smiley story.
Oceanic birds, those that live most of their lives out on the open sea, are truly remarkable considering the harsh environment they live in.
Puffins, mentioned above, live most of their life out on the open sea, only coming ashore to breed. Outside the breeding season they travel to the Bay of Biscay, the Mediterranean, the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, and the fjords of Norway amongst other places.
Northern Fulmars, a bird that many sea cliff climbers will be familiar with, may travel thousands of miles out into the Atlantic over several days to find food which is then converted into "oil" to feed their single chick.
Albatrosses circumnavigating the stormy southern oceans can lock their wings in place with special tendons in their shoulder, and thus use barely any more energy when flying than when resting on land.
The oldest known UK bird was a Manx Shearwater, a species closely related to the albatrosses, which lived into its fifties, yet is tiny compared to the albatrosses. Their winter migration takes them on a lengthy figure of eight circuit through the southern Atlantic and back. Their close relatives, the Sooty Shearwater, does the opposite. Their nearest breeding colonies are on the Falkland Islands. They visit UK waters on their own migrations in the late northern hemisphere summer before returning south.
I've been following the life of Wisdom for several years now. I want to come back as a seabird in my next life.
For anyone interested in this sort of thing I can recommend "Far from Land: The Mysterious Lives of Seabirds" by Michael Brooke as a good introduction.
Post edited at 15:32