*deceased

Figure 1. Band-rumped Storm-Petrel, Nantucket, August 28, 2011. Photograph by Vernon Laux.

We report the first land-based sightings of Band-rumped Storm-Petrels (Hydrobates castro) north of New York City, and the only ones for Massachusetts. These occurred during Hurricane Irene on August 28–29, 2011. Submission of this manuscript has been delayed by the untimely death of Vernon Laux in 2016 and the hectic schedules of everyone else. The authors think it is well worth documenting this record and acknowledge Vern’s role in finding and photographing the Clark Cove individual.

These taxa have a complicated taxonomy, including apparent instances of sympatric speciation in the Azores (Bolton et al. 2008, Taylor et al. 2019). All the Birds of the World (del Hoyo 2020) and the IOC Checklist of Birds of the World (Gill et al. 2024) now list three species in this group, whereas the Howard and Moore Complete Checklist of Birds of the World (Dickinson and Remsen 2013) lists two. We were unable to ascertain to which of these species our sightings pertained, but the overwhelming majority—80% (Howell and Zufelt 2019, Harrison et al. 2021)—of individuals seen in the Gulf Stream off Cape Hatteras during May to September are “Grant’s Storm-Petrels,” the “cool-season” breeding form of Hydrobates castro in the Azores and the Canary and Salvage islands in the eastern North Atlantic (Taylor et al. 2019). Therefore, it seems probable that these sightings and photographs are of the “Grant’s” form of Band-rumped Storm-Petrel.