This is the first comprehensive field guide to the world's 136 species of albatrosses, petrels, shearwaters, storm petrels, and diving petrels. Because many of these birds spend most of their lives far from the coast, traveling from ocean to ocean in a constant search for food, they are poorly known, enigmatic, and often hard to identify in the field. This guide will make field identification much easier. It illustrates every species and shows the distinct plumages of each. It contains 46 high-quality color plates opposite concise descriptions and a color distribution map, with more complete species descriptions following. Species are illustrated on the same page as their confusion species, allowing direct comparisons for more accurate identifications.