Figures H-2, H-3 (above, below). With its dark cap, white forehead and underparts, heavy black band across the upper chest, pale wing-bar, and forked tail, this bird could only be a Ringed Storm-Petrel. Photographed and studied at close range off the Santa Barbara County coast on 2 August 2005, this bird furnished the first record of this enigmatic species north of Colombia (2005-094; Cornelia Oedekoven; photos courtesy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Protected Resouces Division, Southwest Fisheries Science Center, La Jolla, CA).

RINGED STORM-PETREL Oceanodroma hornbyi (Gray, 1854)

Little is known about this distinctive storm-petrel, which is thought to be relatively common over the Humboldt Current from central Chile north to Ecua­dor (Murphy 1922, 1936; Mills 1968; Spear and Ainley 2007). A July 1979 specimen from Isla Gorgona off Colombia (Hilty and Brown 1986) represents this species’ only occurrence north of the equator prior to Cali­fornia’s. Nesting is suspected to occur in arid regions of the Andes Mts. in Peru and northern Chile (Murphy 1936, Mills 1968), but a nest has yet to be found.

Clear photographs obtained on 2 August 2005 about 12 nautical miles off the westernmost point of San Miguel Island in Santa Barbara County (Figures H-2, H-3) document the improbable occurrence of a Ringed Storm-Petrel in California waters (Pyle et al. 2006).