Belles photos d’un Labbe de McCormick prises dans l’archipel de Madère

The South Polar Skua, Stercorarius maccormicki, is a large seabird in the skua family Stercorariidae. It is a large bird that breeds on Antarctic coasts, usually laying two eggs in November and December. It is a migrant, wintering at sea in the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Oceans. Identification of this skua is complicated when it is necessary to distinguish it from the closely related Great Skua of the North Atlantic and the other large southern hemisphere skuas, and only a few data were accepted off the coasts of Western Europe.
Antonio Sandoval Rey and Daniel López Velasco published an article describing two sightings of presumed adult pale morph South Polar Skuas from Estaca de Bares headland (Galicia, NW Spain) on the 12th of August and the 5th of September 2010, but the photos were not very good because of the distance.
The 11th of June 2012, Marc Fasol took good photos of a bird off the Desertas Islands , Madeira archipelago, during a birdwatching organized by Hugues Dufourny. The identification was confirmed by Robert Flood, one of the best seabirds specialists.