23.1 Distinguishing shearwaters and puffins

There are five pieces of morphological information on three species of seabird, Audubon’s shearwater (Puffinus lherminieri), Galápagos shearwater (Puffinus subalaris), and Tropical shearwater (Puffinus dichrous). In the CoModes package from which the dataset has been taken, the birds are described as puffins. Part of the dataset has been used in some publications to illustrate clustering methods for the first two species, e.g., Lebret et al. (2015) and Bouveyron et al. (2019). These data are available with varying variable coding labels in another three R packages, in all of which the birds are also called puffins. The Latin name of the genus is Puffinus, which possibly led to this error. Beautiful images of both puffins and shearwaters, illustrating how very different they are, can be found on the web (Ornithology (2022)).