Puffinus and cold waters. These tubenose birds fly with stiff wings, and use a shearing flight technique to move across wave fronts with the minimum of active flight. Some small species, such as the Manx shearwater, are cruciform in flight, with their long wings held directly out from their bodies. Many are long-distance migrants, perhaps most spectacularly the sooty and short-tailed shearwaters, which perform migrations of 14,000 km or more each year. "Puffinus" shearwaters come to islands and coastal cliffs only to breed. They are nocturnal at the colonial breeding sites, preferring moonless nights to minimise predation. They nest in burrows
Calonectris the Early Pliocene and "Calonectris wingatei" from the Middle Pleistocene, have also been described from fossils. "Calonectris kurodai", another fossil from the Middle Miocene Calvert Formation of Chesapeake Bay is named after the Japanese ornithologist Nagahisa Kuroda. Calonectris Calonectris is a genus of seabirds. The genus name comes from Ancient Greek "kalos", "good" and "nectris", "swimmer". The genus comprises three large shearwaters. There are two other shearwater genera. "Puffinus", which comprises about twenty small to medium-sized shearwaters, and "Procellaria "with another four large species. The latter are usually named as "petrels", although they are thought to be more closely related