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
Persian shearwater Persian shearwater The Persian shearwater ("Puffinus persicus") is a seabird in the family Procellariidae formerly lumped in with Audubon's shearwater ("Puffinus lherminieri"). There are two listed subspecies of the Persian shearwater: After breeding, the northern subspecies ranges from the southern Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the Somali coast across the south of the Arabian Peninsula to the Gulf of Oman, Pakistan and western India. The southern subspecies stays in the area around the Comoros and the Tanzanian and northern Mozambican coast. The nominate subspecies is thought to number in the thousands of pairs on the Khuriya Muriya Islands