The Desertas petrel (Pterodroma deserta) has been recorded flying toward tropical cyclones — and, stranger still, sticking with them, following their wakes for days across thousands of kilometres of open ocean. It’s a behaviour scientists hadn’t documented in any oceanic seabird before.
To get a feel for what that actually looks like, it helps to follow one of them. He’s not a real individual — just a composite built from the tracking data researchers gathered on real Desertas petrels across the North Atlantic — but his journey is a fair picture of what these birds are doing out there.
Seabird From a Remote Atlantic Island
He has the build of a bird made for a life almost entirely spent over water: long, narrow wings, grey plumage, a pale belly. His home is Bugio, the southernmost of the three Desertas Islands near Madeira, Portugal — a steep, narrow spine of volcanic rock that climbs to about 388 metres and sits inside a protected nature reserve.
It doesn’t look like much from a boat. Dry slopes, exposed rock, cliffs dropping straight into the sea. But it’s one of the only places on Earth where Desertas petrels come to breed, returning generation after generation to nest on ground that seems built to discourage anything from living there. The isolation that makes Bugio inhospitable is exactly what makes it valuable — nothing much reaches it, which is part of why the colony has survived.
A Life Connected to the Open Ocean
Finding food, for this Desertas Petrel, means leaving land behind entirely. A bird foraging in a forest can just check the next patch of trees. A seabird can’t do that, because its food doesn’t sit still — fish and squid shift constantly with temperature, currents and the productivity of the water beneath them, so the map of where to eat is being redrawn all the time.
That means Marlo has to read signals: wind direction, wave patterns, subtle shifts in the ocean surface. It’s how pelagic birds cover the distances they do.
Then, one night, something changes. A tropical cyclone is moving across the Atlantic. And instead of turning away from it, Marlo turns toward it.
Scientists Discovered Desertas Petrels Chasing Tropical Cyclones
This isn’t speculation — it’s what a 2024 study in Current Biology, “Oceanic seabirds chase tropical cyclones,” actually found. The researchers tracked Desertas petrels breeding on Bugio and compared their movements with tropical cyclone activity across the North Atlantic.
What they found ran against expectations. Roughly a third of the tracked birds interacted with an approaching cyclone at all, and some of those moved toward the storm’s centre rather than steering clear. About a quarter of the birds went further still, latching onto a cyclone’s wake and staying with it for days, covering thousands of kilometres in the process.
So why would a bird go looking for one of the most violent weather systems on the planet? The answer seems to be underwater.
What Happens to the Ocean When a Hurricane Passes?
From above, a cyclone looks like pure chaos — towering waves, screaming wind, sheets of rain. But its effects don’t stop at the surface.
Hurricanes Mix the Ocean
A cyclone’s winds churn the upper layers of the sea, and that churning shows up in the data. In the waters the researchers studied, sea-surface temperatures dropped after a storm passed while surface chlorophyll — the standard satellite proxy for phytoplankton, and by extension ocean productivity — spiked.
The researchers read this as cyclone wakes disrupting normal ocean stratification and boosting primary production, which could translate into better feeding conditions for surface-hunting petrels.
Think of it as the storm temporarily rearranging the furniture of the ocean. That rearrangement ripples outward through the food web.
From Ocean Mixing to a Feeding Opportunity
It’s worth being precise about what was actually shown here, because it’s easy to overstate. The study didn’t count fish or squid directly — it measured environmental signals (cooler water, more chlorophyll) that are consistent with better foraging conditions, and then observed petrels deliberately seeking out exactly those wakes.
The storm changes the water in ways that may mean more food, and the birds behave as if they know it.
Desertas Petrel Doesn’t Fight the Storm — He Uses It
Picture this bird a few hours into a stretch of ocean that’s given him nothing. Then the wind picks up. Clouds build on the horizon, the swell grows, the pressure drops. To us, those are warning signs. To a petrel, they might just be information.
Petrel wings aren’t built to power through air the way a small landbird’s are — they’re built to exploit it, gliding on shifting currents to cover huge distances for very little effort. And the same 2024 study turned up another piece of the puzzle: birds travelling along a cyclone’s wake picked up noticeably stronger tailwinds than they would have on an alternative route.
So the storm is changing what’s in the water, and It’s changing the air above it too — potentially better food below, and a faster road above it. Put those together and chasing a hurricane starts to look less like recklessness and more like a very refined read of ocean and atmosphere.
A Hurricane Can Be Both Destructive and Productive
Along coastlines, tropical cyclones are destructive — they flatten habitats, kill wildlife, reshape ecosystems overnight. But out in the open ocean, the same storm that wrecks a coastline can, at the same time, be stirring up conditions that a Desertas petrel is specifically adapted to exploit.
The Hidden Food Web Beneath
Wind moves water. Moving water changes near-surface conditions. Phytoplankton respond to the light and nutrients those shifts bring. Those organisms feed zooplankton, zooplankton feed the fish and squid further up, and eventually a seabird finds enough of them to make a journey worthwhile.
One Bird Reveals an Entire Ecosystem
Trace that chain closely enough, and the lines between weather, oceanography and biology start to blur. A storm in the atmosphere reshapes the sea. The reshaped sea shifts microscopic life. That shift moves up the food web, and somewhere at the far end of it, a bird either finds a meal or doesn’t.
A Desertas Petrel isn’t surviving in isolation — he’s embedded in all of it. That’s really what biodiversity means in practice: not a list of species, but a web of dependencies most of us never see.
What Does Climate Change Mean for Birds Like the Desertas Petrel?
This is where it’s tempting to draw a bigger conclusion than the science actually supports. Climate change is altering ocean temperatures and the broader conditions marine animals live in — that much is well established. But the 2024 cyclone study itself doesn’t show that climate change is scrambling these birds’ instincts or pushing them toward storms out of desperation. It shows that they can exploit cyclones, and does so under current conditions. Whether that changes is a separate, much bigger question.
The study does make clear how tightly these birds’ behaviour is tied to relationships between wind, water, and productivity—relationships shaped over many generations. If those relationships shift, the animals built around them have to shift too.
What Happens When Nature’s Signals Change?
Wide-ranging migratory species like the petrel rely on environmental cues to decide when to breed, where to go and where to feed — cues that evolved under conditions that held reasonably steady for a very long time. A rapidly changing climate puts that arrangement under pressure. Some species will adjust. Others will shift their range or timing. Some won’t keep up.
Nobody knows in advance which category any given species falls into, which is exactly why long-term tracking work like this matters — it’s one of the only ways to actually watch the response happen in real time rather than guess at it.
Why Protecting Bugio Matters
Eventually this bird has to come home. After days out over open water, Bugio reappears — a thin strip of volcanic rock that would be easy to miss on a map, but isn’t insignificant at all. It’s where the species breeds, full stop, which makes protecting that island and its nesting ground central to the petrel’s future.
Conservation work there has included restoring habitat and removing introduced mammals, and the breeding areas now sit inside both the Desertas Islands Nature Reserve and the European Natura 2000 network. A lot of conservation work happens in places almost nobody ever sets foot on — a cliff, an island, a stretch of open water that looks empty from shore but isn’t.
One Small Bird, One Enormous Planet
A cyclone crosses the Atlantic, its winds churn the sea, the water’s chemistry shifts, phytoplankton respond, the food web moves with them, and somewhere at the end of that chain a bird finds what it needs and turns for home — back to a small volcanic island where the next generation starts.
Somewhere over the North Atlantic right now, when a storm starts rearranging the ocean beneath it, a small grey seabird may well be turning toward it rather than away — and thanks to the researchers tracking these birds, we’re finally starting to understand why.
Scientific References
Ventura, F., Sander, N., Catry, P., Wakefield, E., De Pascalis, F., Richardson, P. L., Granadeiro, J. P., Silva, M. C., & Ummenhofer, C. C. (2024). Oceanic seabirds chase tropical cyclones. Current Biology, 34(14), 3279–3285.e3. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.06.022.
Instituto das Florestas e da Conservação da Natureza, Madeira. Information on the Desertas Islands Nature Reserve, Bugio and conservation of the Desertas petrel.
