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Sooty Shearwaters are medium-sized seabirds with an overall dark-brown plumage. The only exception from this homogeneous colour is that they have grey or greyish-brown underwing coverts. The legs and feet are grey. The feet reach slightly beyond the end of the tail. Their main characteristic is that in flight they can often be seen with wingtips bowed upwards.

The overall distribution of this species can be assessed, and specific locations where birds have been spotted can be found, based on individual sighting reports submitted by birdwatchers to ebird.org .

The global distribution of the Sooty Shearwater is available HERE .

Sooty Shearwaters are a global, long-distance migratory pelagic species. They are at home anywhere on the open seas on both the southern and the northern hemisphere, EXCEPT the central and northern Indian Ocean and all enclosed waters, such as the Mediterranean, the Baltic Sea and waters between the major groups of islands in South-east Asia (Indonesia, the Philippines, New Guinea). Their breeding grounds are on the southern hemisphere, on islands of the southern Pacific Ocean and the southern Atlantic Ocean.

In Australia, Sooty Shearwaters are present around the South coast, primarily from about Esperance, WA, in the West to the NSW/QLD border in the East, but occasionally from the south-western tip of the continent to about Fraser Island in the East.

Sooty Shearwaters are found mostly on the open seas, but also in coastal waters and, during their breeding season, on offshore islands.

We have not seen Sooty Shearwaters in Australian waters yet. P. Brown spotted Sooty Shearwaters off a cruise ship on the western Pacific Ocean between Bora Bora and Hawaii in April 2019. All photographic information presented on this page has kindly been contributed by P. Brown.