Leygues Islands (, occasionally called ), are a group of small islands and islets that are part of the
subantarctic
The sub-Antarctic zone is a physiographic region in the Southern Hemisphere, located immediately north of the Antarctic region. This translates roughly to a latitude of between 46th parallel south, 46° and 60th parallel south, 60° south of t ...
Kerguelen archipelago
An archipelago ( ), sometimes called an island group or island chain, is a chain, cluster, or collection of islands. An archipelago may be in an ocean, a sea, or a smaller body of water. Example archipelagos include the Aegean Islands (the o ...
, a
French territory in the southern
Indian Ocean
The Indian Ocean is the third-largest of the world's five oceanic divisions, covering or approximately 20% of the water area of Earth#Surface, Earth's surface. It is bounded by Asia to the north, Africa to the west and Australia (continent), ...
.
They were named after
Georges Leygues (1857-1933), a French politician and
Minister of Marine. They are important as a breeding site for
seabird
Seabirds (also known as marine birds) are birds that are adaptation, adapted to life within the marine ecosystem, marine environment. While seabirds vary greatly in lifestyle, behaviour and physiology, they often exhibit striking convergent ...
s and fur seals.
Geography
Leygues Islands lie across the from , and north of the main Kerguelen island of . The two largest islands are and . ÃŽle de Castries, the largest of them, is . Far to the north lie the ''Roches du Terror'' and to the east the ''Roches du Gallieni''
rocks.
The landscape of the islands is mainly flat, though rising westwards to form coastal cliffs. Access from the sea is virtually impossible because of extensive banks of
giant kelp surrounding the group.
Ecology
Humans have never set foot on the islands. A large colony of
Antarctic fur seals occurs which has probably never been
hunted and which has enabled the recolonisation of other sites from which the species was formerly exterminated.
[BirdLife International. (2012). Important Bird Areas factsheet: ÃŽles Leygues. Downloaded from http://www.birdlife.org on 2012-01-20.]
Important Bird Area
The islands have been identified as a 24 km
2 Important Bird Area
An Important Bird and Biodiversity Area (IBA) is an area identified using an internationally agreed set of criteria as being globally important for the conservation of bird populations.
IBA was developed and sites are identified by BirdLife Int ...
(IBA) by
BirdLife International
BirdLife International is a global partnership of non-governmental organizations that strives to conserve birds and their habitats. BirdLife International's priorities include preventing extinction of bird species, identifying and safeguarding i ...
. Five or six pairs of
wandering albatross
The snowy albatross (''Diomedea exulans''), also known as the wandering albatross, white-winged albatross, or goonie, is a large seabird from the family Diomedeidae
Albatrosses, of the biological family (biology), family Diomedeidae, are la ...
es breed there as well as unknown numbers of
northern giant petrels and
Kerguelen shags. Other
petrel
Petrels are tube-nosed seabirds in the phylogenetic order Procellariiformes.
Description
Petrels are a monophyletic group of marine seabirds, sharing a characteristic of a nostril arrangement that results in the name "tubenoses". Petrels enco ...
s may also nest on the islands, but data are lacking because the only available information is from offshore observations.
[
]
References
Leygues
Important Bird Areas of Kerguelen
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