Pat Miller has been walking Northland’s beaches, looking for treasure, for more than half a century. In September last year he made his most notable discovery yet – a new bird record for New Zealand. Most New Zealand bird enthusiasts have never heard of Jouanin’s petrel. Those who knew of it would not have rated it as a species likely to occur here. You would have far more chance of seeing one while sitting at anchor off the Strait of Hormuz, biding your time by gazing idly out to sea.
Pat’s enthusiasm for beach patrolling began as a schoolboy in 1971. Then (as now) based in Whangārei, he learnt about beach patrolling when he joined the Ornithological Society of New Zealand (OSNZ – now Birds New Zealand). Beach patrolling (from a birding perspective) involves walking the tideline looking for – and identifying – corpses of beach-wrecked birds. The following extracts are in Pat’s own words:
In Northland, beach patrolling began, to the best of my knowledge, in December 1971. It was driven by the interest of David Crockett, the man who rediscovered the Chatham Island taiko. David had moved to Whangārei from Whanganui just a few months before.
Ripirō Beach is the Northland west coast beach that runs from Maunganui Bluff in the north to Pouto Point in the south – a distance of 107 km, west of Dargaville. David organised several carloads of OSNZers to cover much of the beach. The first two consecutive weekends of patrols netted a grand total of 760 birds. According to my records we covered 88 km. The first day was an exciting day in the life of a 17-year-old schoolboy. As I recall, I walked with Miss Diana Whyte on a stretch somewhere near Round Hill and I well remember personally finding a royal albatross and a broad-billed prion.
From that day on I was hooked on seabirds. We brought everything back. Bill Campbell’s old black Vauxhall Velox had its boot jam-packed full of sacks of dead birds and the back seat was packed up to the roof with more, leaving just enough room for one person to squeeze in next to them. And so we travelled back to Whangārei, delivering the birds to David’s place for identifying and counting.
Beach patrolling took off after that on both coasts of Northland. It was an important part of Northland OSNZ activities for the rest of the 20th century. We endeavoured to cover as much as possible of the beaches once a month. The intensity began to drop off in the 21st century, although for the first decade there was still a good level of activity. The second decade of the 21st century saw a dramatic decline in beach patrol activity on Ripirō Beach.
Beaches have always been my happy place. As a car-less schoolboy, beach patrolling was a means to get to beaches beyond cycling distance. I was a regular participant. I would cycle into Onerahi on a Friday night, stay at Miss Whyte’s place and get a ride to the meeting place with her on Saturday morning. For the next 23 years, it was an important part of my life.
In recent years, Pat has paid particular attention to fish and other creatures that have washed ashore, in addition to the birds.
…in 2021 I found what turned out to be the largest ever cheekspot scorpionfish on record (sent, with much difficulty, to Te Papa). Other notable fishy finds were a striated frogfish in 1985, a smooth leatherjacket in 1994, and a mako shark sometime in the 1970s or 80s.
After retiring, I decided to take up “beach combing” for fishes in a systematic way. I tried to cover three beaches every month (two on the east coast and a section of Ripirō Beach on the west coast), and occasionally other beaches as time and opportunity permitted…I have so far found 60 different species of fishes, 12 species of marine mammals, three marine turtle species (one of them alive), and a yellow-bellied sea snake.
My most notable seabird finds have included New Zealand’s second record of providence petrel (1984), New Zealand’s sixth mainland record of Leach’s storm petrel (July 2025), amokura | red-tailed tropicbird (1984), white-tailed tropicbird (2014), white-naped petrel (2022), Chatham Island mollymawk (2023), long-tailed skua (alive, 2023), and wedge-tailed shearwater (2025).
Some of my more exciting discoveries have been of seabirds that were banded at distant sites, most notably a grey-headed mollymawk found dead on Ripirō Beach in 2010 that had been banded as a chick on Prince Edward Island in the southern Indian Ocean just 2 months prior.
However, Pat’s best ever find was on 16 September 2025, only 2 months after finding the Leach’s storm petrel:
I was not expecting anything quite that exciting again so soon, and as I approached a dark-coloured seabird lying on an old tideline south of Glinks Gully, I thought “Ooh a Kerguelen petrel”. It was the right time of year and the bird was the right size. However, when I picked it up and turned it over, I saw a long pointy tail and a small head with a robust heavy bill and realised this was not a bird that I was familiar with.
I ran through what possible species it could be, and wondered whether it could be a Bulwer’s petrel. Rather surprisingly, I found that I could get reception on my cell phone and googled that species. The photographs that came up fitted, and I was convinced at the time that I had found the third New Zealand record of a Bulwer’s petrel.
When I got home that evening, I pulled out all the seabird books I had, looked at the pictures and checked the measurements I had taken. To my amazement, I found that they were too large for a Bulwer’s petrel, but they exactly fitted a Jouanin’s petrel!”
Jouanin’s petrel is a little-known seabird that breeds on the remote Yemeni island of Socotra, in the western Arabian Sea. The nearest that they are known to have occurred to New Zealand is Ashmore Reef, about 100 km south of Indonesia, on the far side of Australia. Hadoram Shirihai’s spectacular images of live birds used in this blog were taken off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, at the western approaches to the Strait of Hormuz.
Pat prepared details of his discovery as an Unusual Bird Report, which he submitted to the Birds New Zealand Records Appraisal Committee, who agreed with his identification. Just 8 months after making his momentous discovery, Pat has published details of his find in the latest issue of the journal Notornis. You can read his account here: First record of Jouanin’s petrel in New Zealand.
Other seabirds that have so far been recorded in New Zealand on the basis of a single beach-wrecked specimen include Cory’s shearwater (1934), MacGillivray’s prion (1954), Newell’s shearwater (1994), and Matsudaira’s storm petrel (2022).
Congratulations to Pat for his exciting find and addition to this exclusive list!
Related Te Papa blogs
- A new bird for New Zealand – MacGillivray’s prion
- A new bird for New Zealand – Horsfield’s bronze cuckoo
- A new bird for New Zealand – Matsudaira’s storm petrel
- A new bird for New Zealand – black-naped tern
- A new bird for New Zealand – black tern
- A new bird for New Zealand – rose-crowned fruit-dove
- A new bird for New Zealand – collared petrel
- Over-looked for a century: Macquarie Island shag added to the New Zealand list
- A new bird for New Zealand – Cox’s sandpiper
- A new bird for New Zealand – laughing gull
- Two new birds for New Zealand – Herald petrel and red-footed booby
- A new bird for New Zealand – northern fulmar
- A new bird for New Zealand – magpie-lark
- A new bird for New Zealand – dusky woodswallow
- A new bird for New Zealand – buff-breasted sandpiper
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