Subantarctic Shearwater Puffinus elegans Scientific name definitions

For a fine illustration of how our understanding of small shearwater systematics has radically changed in the past couple of decades, one need look no further than this Southern Ocean species. Until comparatively recently, it was almost universally considered to be conspecific not only with Little Shearwater (Puffinus assimilis), which as currently constituted is now confined to the Australasian region, but also frequently with two northeast Atlantic Ocean taxa, Barolo Shearwater (P. baroli) and Boyd’s Shearwater (P. boydi). Consequently, what was once a single, very wide-ranging species, has become four! Subantarctic Shearwater is, as its name suggests, reasonably widespread at subpolar latitudes in the Southern Ocean, nesting in the Atlantic on the Tristan da Cunha group and Gough Island, and in the Chatham and Antipodes archipelagos, south of New Zealand. In addition, small shearwaters nesting on St Paul Island, in the southern Indian Ocean possibly refer to this species, and the frequent presence of Subantarctic Shearwaters in the waters off Chile might reflect the presence of a breeding population in this region of the South Pacific.