The Pintado Petrel is a black-and-white mottled seabird of the Southern Ocean. It breeds near Antarctica and shifts its feeding range with the seasons.
It has dark markings on the head and mottled black-and-white plumage on the back and wings. The amount of black and white on the upperwing differs between New Zealand subspecies.
Pintado Petrels, also called Cape Petrels, breed along Fildes Peninsula and Ardley Island on King George Island in Antarctica’s South Shetland Islands. Monitoring identified 37 breeding sites on the peninsula and produced 36 years of breeding-pair records. They nest on coastal rock ledges and cliffs, which makes accurate counts difficult, so long-term local population data are scarce. Numbers varied without a clear trend from 1985 to 2006.
After 2008, the number of pairs fell by an average of 10.6% a year through 2020. Only one pair remained in the surveyed area in 2020, compared with a high of 338 pairs recorded in 1986. The 2020 count was about 0.3% of the 1986 figure. Long-term seabird counts help track environmental change in the Southern Ocean.
An extinction-risk assessment has not been added yet.
Human disturbance was recorded at only a few small breeding sites, which the authors said could not explain the decline across all sites. They considered reduced food availability the more likely cause of the wider population drop.