Seabird Photo Albums
This album page provides links to galleries that feature images of Seabirds that occupy various ocean and pelagic habitats. The primary gallery displays portraits of individual species together with juvenile/immature and male/female dimorphic species when I’ve been able to photograph them.
Penguins are Southern Hemisphere ocean birds that mainly inhabit the cold waters of Antarctic and subantarctic. Auks are marine, neritic and pelagic birds found in northern oceans.
Albatrosses, Petrels and Shearwaters
The ‘tubenoses’ comprise albatrosses, mainly found in the Southern Ocean. Together with petrel and cosmopolitan shearwater families, which have the greatest diversity in the Southern Hemisphere.
Boobies, Frigatebirds and Tropicbirds
Boobies, frigatebirds and tropicbirds are marine, mainly pelagic birds. They roam tropical and subtropical oceans but come ashore to breed.
Seabird Photo Album Taxonomy
The second in a series of three waterbird photo albums. The simplified family tree illustrates the hierarchy of high-level bird clades and orders relevant to the Seabirds Albums. The tree is a time-ordered evolutionary history, oldest first, based on the Taxonomy in Flux Checklist. The album includes seven Aves orders from the Ramsar Convention list that contains fifteen orders.
In the arrangement of orders, I separated seabirds from waterbirds and core waterbirds because seabirds spend most of their life at sea only visiting land to breed. The waterbirds and core waterbirds spend most of their lives in wetlands, although many make exceptionally long migrations to breed.
Charadriiformes contains several families that I split between the waterbird and seabird albums. I’ve also split Suliformes families between seabirds and core waterbirds albums.
I’ve transposed Charadriiformes and Ardeae clade as published in the IOC ‘revised order of birds’.
Auks belong to the Charadriiformes in Neoaves clade. Charadriiformes comprises both waterbirds and seabirds. The seabird album displays Auks while Waterbirds Photo Album features Waders (Shorebirds) and Gulls, Terns and Skimmers.
Tropicbirds belong to the Phaethontiformes order, one of two orders in superorder Eurypygimorphae which is sister to Aequornithes (Core Waterbirds) clade.
The final group of three albums feature three orders placed in Aequornithes (Core Waterbirds) clade.
Penguins belong to Sphenisciformes, sister to Procellariiformes (Tubenoses), but grouped with the Auks for convenience.
Tubenoses – Albatrosses, Petrels & Shearwaters placed in Procellariiformes.
Boobies and Frigatebirds from Suliformes order. Suliformes also includes Cormorants and Darters, displayed in the Core Waterbirds Photo Album.
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