- general -
Seabirds are those birds that spend most of their lives on the open waters of the ocean, coming to land only to breed.  This group is composed of members of several different bird families, and may be broadly lumped into two subgroups based on distribution:  a coastal or nearshore group that is most common within about three miles of land and includes the sea ducks, loons, grebes, and gulls; and a pelagic (oceanic) group that generally occurs farther offshore, out of sight of land, and includes shearwaters, petrels, puffins, fulmars, gannets, phalaropes, skuas, kittiwakes, jaegers, and auks.  Other waterbirds such as terns and cormorants are associated with the sea but occur primarily in bays and on land during the non-breeding period. 
 

- threats -
Major threats to pelagic birds in southern New England and the Mid-Atlantic region include oil spills and impacts to water quality, or factors that affect their food base, such as overharvesting of fish.  Other activities on the continental shelf, such as ocean dumping and sand mining, can directly or indirectly impact pelagic birds.
 

- details -
Information on the movements and distribution of many pelagic seabird species is incomplete, partly because of their extensive use of the ocean as 'wintering habitat' during the Northern Hemisphere's summer months.  After nesting on islands crowded with neighbors only a few feet away in every direction, many species continue to be gregarious despite the wide open ocean spaces they inhabit during the non-breeding season.  Flocks of sooty and greater shearwaters that number in the hundreds of thousands are seen off the Mid-Atlantic and New England coasts. 

Several pelagic species have trans-equatorial travel habits, migrating between the two global polar regions each year.  Wilson's storm-petrels, weighing less than four tablespoons of butter, breed in the Antarctic during December and January, the South Pole's warm months, and fly nearly ten thousand miles to the mid- and northern Atlantic Ocean for the months of May through August.