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
Great shearwater can be seen in large numbers from ships or appropriate headlands. They have a piercing "eeyah" cry usually given when resting in groups on the water. Great shearwater The great shearwater ("Ardenna gravis"; formerly "Puffinus gravis") is a large shearwater in the seabird family Procellariidae. "Ardenna" was first used to refer to a seabird by Italian naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi in 1603, and "gravis" is Latin for "heavy". The great shearwater's relationships are unclear. It belongs in the group of large species that have been separated as genus "Ardenna" (Penhallurick & Wink 2004); within these, it might be allied with the