Egg of ''Puffinus boydi''
(coll. MHNT) Boyd's shearwater (''Puffinus boydi''), also known as the Cape Verde little shearwater, is a small

shearwater Shearwaters are medium-sized long-winged seabirds in the petrel family Procellariidae. They have a global marine distribution, but are most common in temperate and cold waters, and are pelagic outside the breeding season. Description These tube ...

which breeds in the

Cape Verde Cape Verde or Cabo Verde, officially the Republic of Cabo Verde, is an island country and archipelagic state of West Africa in the central Atlantic Ocean, consisting of ten volcanic islands with a combined land area of about . These islands ...

archipelago of the

Atlantic Ocean The Atlantic Ocean is the second largest of the world's five borders of the oceans, oceanic divisions, with an area of about . It covers approximately 17% of Earth#Surface, Earth's surface and about 24% of its water surface area. During the ...

some 570 km off the coast of

West Africa West Africa, also known as Western Africa, is the westernmost region of Africa. The United Nations geoscheme for Africa#Western Africa, United Nations defines Western Africa as the 16 countries of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, The Gambia, Gha ...

. The

epithet An epithet (, ), also a byname, is a descriptive term (word or phrase) commonly accompanying or occurring in place of the name of a real or fictitious person, place, or thing. It is usually literally descriptive, as in Alfred the Great, Suleima ...

commemorates British

ornithologist Ornithology, from Ancient Greek ὄρνις (''órnis''), meaning "bird", and -logy from λόγος (''lógos''), meaning "study", is a branch of zoology dedicated to the study of birds. Several aspects of ornithology differ from related discip ...

Arnold Boyd.

Sexual Segregation

Females take longer foraging trips and travel further north. This seems to be driven by differing preferences for chlorophyll concentration and sea surface temperature. Overall spacial overlap of sexes is low. However, their diets are the same, consisting of fish, fish larvae, and squid. Both males and females feed chicks, but the males contribute more. This may be because females spend more time incubating eggs and are therefore more deprived of nutrition.

Taxonomy

Boyd's shearwater is sometimes considered a

subspecies In Taxonomy (biology), biological classification, subspecies (: subspecies) is a rank below species, used for populations that live in different areas and vary in size, shape, or other physical characteristics (Morphology (biology), morpholog ...

of either the

little shearwater The little shearwater (''Puffinus assimilis'') is a small shearwater in the petrel family Procellariidae. Despite the generic name, it is unrelated to the puffins, which are auks, the only similarity being that they are both burrow-nesting seab ...

Audubon's shearwater The Sargasso shearwater (''Puffinus lherminieri'') is a small Tropics, tropical seabird in the Procellariidae, petrel family (biology), family. The only shearwater to nest primarily in the Caribbean, it ranges throughout the western Atlantic duri ...

or Macaronesian shearwater. It has also been shown to be synonymous with the extinct ''Puffinus parvus'' Shufeldt of

Bermuda Bermuda is a British Overseas Territories, British Overseas Territory in the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean. The closest land outside the territory is in the American state of North Carolina, about to the west-northwest. Bermuda is an ...

References

* * Puffinus Birds described in 1912 Endemic birds of Cape Verde {{Procellariiformes-stub