What exactly does a petrel chick smell like?

By Kimberly Ridley | Downeast Magazine

Great Duck Island is a notoriously tough place to land a boat. There’s no dock, just a steep, slippery ramp on the island’s exposed south side, which can only be approached in a Zodiac on a day when seas are under four feet. But one afternoon late last September, a pair of students from Bar Harbor’s College of the Atlantic finessed the landing and hauled hundreds of pounds of boat and passengers partway up the ramp—saving us not only from slipping but also from the dreaded “ass slapper,” a ledge where breaking waves tend to soak one’s derriere.

Time was short on this trip to Great Duck, 10 miles south of Mount Desert. The goal was to button up the college’s field station for the winter and have one last quick look for some of the world’s most mysterious seabirds—not ducks, despite the island’s name, but Leach’s storm petrels, diminutive and dusky cousins of the albatross.

Few people have ever seen these starling-size seabirds, which have gunmetal plumage, white rumps, and hooked black bills topped with odd tubular nostrils. They live far out to sea and come ashore only to breed on remote northern islands, where they nest in shallow underground burrows that can wind and twist for up to six feet, excavated by the males in spruce forests and meadows. Parents travel to and from their burrows only at night, filling the air with eerie chuckles that sound like goblins doing helium.

Making storm-petrels stranger still: their distinctive aroma, which has been described as pleasantly musty. It’s a result of the oily plankton soup that adults make in their stomachs to feed chicks, combined with the musk of their nurseries’ earthen interiors. “Like rich, sun-warmed soil,” says COA senior Eleanor Gnam ’23, who has studied petrels on Great Duck for the last two summers. “Or like very old library stacks.”