On today’s episode: the sounds of Buller’s shearwaters in New Zealand’s Poor Knights Islands.

Our guest today is Megan Friesen, a behavioral ecologist who is currently working with the Northern New Zealand Seabird Trust to examine the breeding behavior of a Pacific seabird species called Buller’s shearwater. Also known as the New Zealand shearwater, the seabird breeds predominantly on Tawhiti Rahi and Aorangi, the main islands of the Poor Knights Islands, which lie off of northern New Zealand.

In this Field Notes segment, Friesen (who is also Conservation Manager for Seattle Audubon) explains why bioacoustics is so important to the research she is doing with the Northern New Zealand Seabird Trust, and plays recordings of the birds from both of the islands where it breeds.

Here’s this episode’s top news:

• Scientists stumble upon hundreds of octopus moms in the deep sea
• Suspected poisoning takes down 11 lions in Uganda park
• ‘Boom and bust’ cycle of deep-sea trawling unsustainable, study finds
• Half a ton of pangolin scales seized on the way to Asia from Benin
• New species of ‘exploding ant’ discovered in Borneo

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Follow Mike Gaworecki on Twitter: @mikeg2001

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