Première donnée d’un Labbe antarctique en Europe

Evidence from mtDNA suggests that two skuas, one discovered in the Scilly Islands Corn-wall in October 2001, the other in Glamorgan in February 2002, belong to the Brown Skua group Catharacta antarctica – a species not previously recorded in the North Atlantic. These molecular data do not exclude the possibility of either bird being a hybrid between Brown Skua and South Polar Skua C. maccormicki, but population estimates suggest that this is unlikely. More importantly, biometrics show that the Glamorgan bird is much smaller than hybrids but matches Falkland Skua C. a. antarctica. The distributions of C. antarctica sub-species at sea are not well known, but the discovery of two of these birds in the UK suggests that they may wander more extensively than previously thought.
In this article, published in Ibis (the magazine of the British Ornithologist Union), Stephen Votier, Robert W. furness et Stuart Bearhop from the Ornithology Group, Richard G. Nowell from the Old Beach Farm, Kate Orr et Martyn Kennedy from the Molecular Ecology & Evolution Group (University of Glasgow) describe the technics and the analysis used to identify the two skuas, and their conclusions.