Procellariiformes
Role in culture

The most important family culturally is the albatrosses, which have been described by one author as "the most legendary of birds". Albatrosses have featured in poetry in the form of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 's famous 1798 poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which in turn gave rise to the usage of albatross as metaphor for a burden. More generally, albatrosses were believed to be good omens, and to kill one would bring bad luck. There are few instances of petrels in culture, although there are sailors' legends regarding the storm petrels, which are considered to warn of oncoming storms. In general, petrels were considered to be "soul birds", representing the souls of drowned sailors, and it was considered unlucky to touch them.

In the Russian language, many petrel species from the Hydrobatidae and Procellariidae families of the order Procellariiformes are known as burevestnik, which literally means 'the announcer of the storm'. When in 1901, the Russian writer Maxim Gorky turned to the imagery of subantarctic avifauna to describe Russian society's attitudes to the coming revolution, he used a storm-announcing petrel as the lead character of a poem that soon became popular in the revolutionary circles as "the battle anthem of the revolution". Although the species called " stormy petrel " in English is not one of those to which the burevestnik name is applied in Russian (it, in fact, is known in Russian as an entirely un-romantic kachurka), the English translators uniformly used the "stormy petrel" image in their translations of the poem, usually known in English as The Song of the Stormy Petrel.

Various tubenose birds are relevant to the mythologies and oral traditions of Polynesia. The Māori used the wing bones of the albatross to carve flutes. In Hawaiian mythology, Laysan albatrosses are considered aumakua, being a sacred manifestation of the ancestors, and quite possibly also the sacred bird of Kāne. The storm petrel features prominently in the "Origin of Birds" myth.
detectable_format:constrained_response