Petrel station soon to be deserted

On a stormy night, very soon, a young grey-faced petrel will emerge from a burrow on a headland above Whangarei Harbour, lift his wings and wait for the wind to carry him aloft for the first time.
It will be the last time the bird touches land again for several years, until the call of a mate and an amazing homing instinct bring him home.
He - or maybe it will be a she - is one of 31 petrels nearing fledgling age (about four months) on Matakohe-Limestone Island.
One by one, within the next two weeks they will all have taken their unseen night journey to the open ocean.
But none of the birds were hatched on the island, nor have any grey-faced petrels in living memory.
These chicks are part of a Friends of Matakohe-Limestone Island project to see the species once again colonise and breed naturally on the island.
After years of living on the oceans, when they are nearing the mating age, instinct will lead the birds back to the site they left years earlier.
The remarkable World Wildlife Fund-supported five-year project is only in its second year, so no birds raised on the island are yet old enough to return.
"It'll be a pretty major event when they start coming back," says ranger Colin Bishop, who has played a major part in the programme.
For the past two years, fluffy grey newly hatched birds have been chicknapped from their natural colony on Taranga, or Hen Island, in Bream Bay. Three times before the birds were taken from their burrows, teams comprising Friends members, Department of Conservation staff and ornithologists visited Taranga and identified the ones they wanted.
For weeks since then, the fluffy grey chicks have been housed in man-made burrows at Matakohe-Limestone Island's "petrel station".
They are regularly weighed and measured by Mr Bishop, Rose Collen, a bird expert from the Wairarapa Mount Bruce centre, and a team of experienced volunteers.
The distance parent birds travel, feeding hundreds of kilometres out at sea off the continental shelf, mean chicks are only fed once every few days.
The same feeding pattern sees each chick on the island syringed a sardine smoothie every two days, requiring the Friends to buy 400 tins of sardines at a time.
About the size of a seagull, petrels are not large birds but dark grey with lighter faces, they are sleek and beautiful. Called oi by Maori, they are one of several species of seabirds known as "muttonbird".
Over the centuries, assault by environmental changes, coupled with two-legged predators who also developing a taste for them, the grey faced petrels' habitat gradually shrank to offshore islands and very remote, inaccessible coastal areas. Other than at South Hokianga Head, there are no known on-shore colonies in Northland.
But the reintroduction of petrels to Matakohe-Limestone Island has more to do with restoring the island to a former state than saving the species, which is not endangered.
On the next windy, dark night, the first of this year's brood might launch itself on the next stage of its remarkable journey. And in years to come, that same mysterious survival instinct might see the birds return, and another natural cycle begin on Matakohe.