Honolulu Star-Advertiser © Susan Scott
November 17, 1997
The Seattle Times this month reports that a rare seabird has been spotted in Puget Sound.
This species, never before seen north of San Francisco, has been causing a flutter of excitement around the sound.
Birders there have been traveling to Protection Island, an aptly named national wildlife refuge, to get a glimpse of it.
And that’s not so easy.
Since the island is off limits to people, you have to look for the bird by boat.
What is this rare seabird? Well, it’s no rarity to Hawaii birders and boaters – it’s a brown booby, one of three booby species that nest in the Hawaiian Islands. (The others are red-footed and masked boobies.)
Boobies are high on my list of favorite seabirds because they’re so much fun.
Their behavior is amusing, their calls are silly, and their name puts a smile on nearly everyone’s faces.
Years ago, I wrote an Oceanwatch column about a pair of these seabirds that landed on the deck of our sailboat, midway between Costa Rica and Hawaii.
We welcomed their company and enjoyed their antics.
The day the article came out, I turned to page A2. The headline read, “Two boobies win the hearts of lonely sailors.”
It was changed in the later editions.
Booby birds were given their goofy common name by Spanish sailors who thought the birds’ behavior clownish, bobo in Spanish.
But I wouldn’t call these birds clowns. I’d call them tame.
Since booby birds spend most of their lives at sea and therefore evolved with no land predators, they aren’t afraid of people.
Once, while sailing past Nihoa in extraordinarily rough seas, we had a booby land on top of our furled main sail.
The bird balanced precariously on the wildly rocking boom while trying to hang its head down to look at the two of us sitting in the cockpit. Its bold curiosity was hilarious.
Brown boobies tend to rest on buoys (no grade-school humor intended), making most Hawaii boaters familiar with this species.
When I needed some pictures of brown boobies for a book I was writing, I asked a fisherman friend to take me out the Haleiwa boat channel to search for some.
We didn’t go far. A buoy there was packed with a dozen or so of these goose-sized birds.
Another time, I spotted a brown booby on one of the outside buoys of the Ala Wai boat channel.
“Closer, closer,” I called to my partner who was driving our 37-foot ketch. He got so engrossed in watching the bird, he ran the boat squarely into the buoy.
Brown boobies have a large nesting colony in the Gulf of California, which is where some people speculate the Puget Sound wanderer came from.
It’s possible, however, that it’s one of our own.
Wherever it’s from, there’s one thing I’m sure of: The bird is certain to win the hearts of some not-so-lonely sailors.