It is the smallest species of shearwater and is black and white with a bluish gray beak and blue tarsi.

First collected in 1963 and thought to be a little shearwater (Puffinus assimilis) it was determined using DNA analysis to be distinct in 2011.

The species is named after Edwin Horace Bryan Jr. a former curator of the B. P. Bishop Museum at Honolulu.

[2] On February 7, 2012, DNA tests on six specimens found in Ogasawara alive and dead between 1997 and 2011 determined that they were Bryan's shearwaters.

[5] In 2015 a small breeding colony of Bryan's shearwaters was found on the island of Higashijima in Japan.