I WONDER...Why do so many people "chase" rare birds?

The young red-footed booby making a splash on the Port Townsend waterfront. Its 5-foot wingspan speeds it over the water in search of fish prey.

In the birding world, nothing stirs up excitement quite like the report of a rare bird being spotted in your region. Know as vagrants, these are birds that show up in areas where they don’t normally occur. This can happen for a variety of reasons, most commonly being blown off course during migration by a hurricane or other storm.

Here in the Pacific Northwest there are examples of vagrants every year. Snowy owls that head south in response to food shortages during population booms. An east coast warbler that accidentally wanders west. A king eider duck following migrating waterfowl to Tacoma’s Commencement Bay for the winter from its normal Alaskan waters.

In fact, my “spark bird,” or the one that first aroused my interest in birding in 1982, was a beautiful vagrant smew duck that somehow found its way to a pond in Foster City, California from Siberia!

With webbed feet and long bill, the booby is supremely adapted for a life fishing at sea.

The buzz around a booby

On July 31st, a biologist on a ship noticed an unusual-looking bird perched on a channel market near Port Townsend Washington, and ID’d it as a red-footed booby. Word quickly spread in the birding community and soon hundreds of birders from all over the west coast and beyond descended to see and photograph it, myself included. As vagrants go, this one is extremely hospitable towards visitors. For over a month it’s been perched on the roof of the Marine Science Center, nearby pilings, and on the mast of the Hawaiian Chieftain tall ship moored there.

During my visit, the beautiful seabird rested and preened, occasionally taking trips to forage in the bay. Boobies are dramatic plunge-feeders, dropping with missile-like speed and precision head first to snag fish underwater.

The booby making its abrupt, missile-like plunge after sand lance fish.

Boobies are cool birds that aren’t normally found here so it makes sense people would like to see it, but what explains the extreme interest in this particular bird?

First, the booby making headlines this year strayed in a very big way. Basing speculation on its origin from a fairly distinct plumage pattern (birds from different locations often have different feather coloring), seabird specialists think it may have wandered here from Christmas Island in the South Pacific - 3,750 miles away! That’s some wrong turn!

Boobies spend most of their resting time preening to keep their feathers in top shape after dives.

Here is the red-footed booby’s normal range, thanks to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology:

Boobies don’t migrate so its anyone’s guess how it ended up here. Other members of the booby family (there are 7 species) have been spotted far from home riding on ships’ masts, getting fish treats from the crew as incentive to stick around.

A win for the life list!

The massive departure from its regular range and routine is one reason it’s drawing a crowd of appreciative bird-watchers and other non-birding locals. But the real draw for some is the chance to add a super-rare bird to their “life list.” Many of us birders track our sightings using a community science platform from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology called eBird. This is an insanely powerful database with hundreds of thousands of birders contributing more than 100 million bird sightings and photographs annually from all around the world.

Birders submit checklists from their outings that, together, contribute to a wealth of knowledge about bird distribution, population size, and migration patterns. But beyond contributing to science, eBird allows you to track your personal birding journey, compiling all of your sightings into what is known as a “life list.” (Those older birders among us will note that this list was once kept on paper in a birding journal. Many still maintain this form of record too.)

Many birders LOVE data (we wear our Bird Nerd badges proudly!) and eBird allows for all sorts of ways to track your lifetime bird list, breaking it down by continent, country, state, or county - even your backyard! Some birders are highly competitive, both with themselves and other birders. It’s not uncommon for a birder to take on a “Big Year,” (perhaps you’ve seen the movie) where they challenge themselves to find as many bird species in a certain region in one year, traveling widely and sometimes spending a fortune in the effort.

One of the most common Big Year goals is to find as many birds as possible in the American Birding Association Area. This is comprised of the U.S., Canada, and the Hawaiian islands and currently numbers 1141 ABA-sanctioned species. This includes pelagic (offshore) birds seen within 200 miles of land. Birds are grouped by codes, depending on their rarity. The number is always changing based on re-classification of species or vagrants that turn up and are thereby added to the official list.

Back to the booby. While there have been a few reports of the red-footed and other species of boobies in Washington and elsewhere in the PNW, most of those occur at sea where they’re spotted by boat-based birders. So this particular bird provides an opportunity to add an extremely hard-to-see species to your ABA life list - something some birders take very seriously. It may, in fact, be a once-in-a-lifetime experience for many.

I regret that I wasn’t a “lister” from the beginning of my long interest in birding, starting recording my sightings seriously only in 2017. So far I’ve submitted 550 checklists from 18 countries in North America, Europe, South America, and Antarctica, totaling 720 species. (I’m disappointed that I didn’t record several hundred more species from multiple trips to Asia and Africa.) I’ve seen red-footed boobies before, but not in the ABA area.

We don’t know what fate holds for the vagrant booby. Being a non-migratory bird from near the equator, it may not know what to make of our now shortening days. If it doesn’t leave soon, it’s unlikely to survive. I know hundreds of people are rooting for it, including me.

Personally, I care little about having the biggest list or being competitive. To me, birding offers so much more. I love that my favorite hobby allows me to continually learn and add to scientific knowledge. Mostly, I delight in observing the fascinating lives of these creatures that live among us so intimately or so far away in all the different habitats of the world. They fill me with endless wonder and joy.

One third of all Americans call themselves at least casual birdwatchers. If you want to join those ranks, I’d be happy to help!

Hanging out with king penguins while birding in my favorite place - South Georgia Island