First for Britain: Red-footed Booby in Sussex
A Red-footed Booby is currently being cared for by the RSPCA after one was found exhausted on the beach at Hastings in East Sussex on Sunday 4th September.
Hastings resident, Gail Cohen, spotted the booby on the beach whilst having lunch with a friend at her beach hut. Having previously visited the Galapagos Islands and seen Red-footed Booby there, she knew what species it was. After realising that the bird was poor health she called a local wildlife rescue centre, East Sussex Wildlife Rescue Ambulance Service.
After an overnight stay, the RSPCA took over care for the bird at their Mallydams Wood Wildlife Centre in Hastings.
Giving an update on the bird, Simon Fathers, manager of the Mallydams centre said that it is very weak, underweight and dehydrated and is being given specialist treatment.
The RSPCA have asked birders not to make contact with them or the Mallydams centre, the bird is not viewable. Any updates as to its condition and possible release will be broadcast across all the RBA services.
If the bird does survive it is not yet known what the plans are for its release. There have been suggestions that it might be flown back to the Galapagos for release, as it has been assumed to originated from there.
Red-footed Booby has a wide tropical waters distribution, the nearest breeding colonies to Britain being in the Caribbean. It is polymorphic, with white and white-tailed brown morphs predominating in Atlantic and Caribbean populations (fully brown morphs are absent or very rare here). Pacific adults occur in both a fully brown morph (white-tailed brown morphs are uncommon) and a white morph (white-tailed in Hawaii, dark-tailed in the Galapagos and mixed off Mexico).
The photographs of this bird show a brown bird with red legs, some red in the gular patch and facial skin, a bluish bill and a white tail. It therefore appears to be a white-tailed brown morph, consistent with a Caribbean origin, the most likely source area.
Red-footed Boobies are rare in North America, even in Florida, and have strayed only as far north as South Carolina. Against this background, the increasing number of records in the northeast Atlantic is perhaps surprising but this is certainly a species on the rise. The first Western Palearctic record was a bird off the Cape Verdes on 17th April 1977 and another was in the same island group in 1986. In the new millennium, the number of occurrences has increased dramatically, with more in the Cape Verdes (including a flock of seven) and records from the Canaries, the Azores, Spain and France, the latter inland just north of the Mediterranean coast. An occurrence in Britain is therefore perhaps not too surprising.
Everyone is now hoping that, first and foremost the bird can be rehabilitated with a view to it being released back into the wild. Quite when and how this release might be undertaken remains unclear at the moment. but it goes without saying that it would attract significant interest conducted in public in a planned and managed fashion. Artificial ‘ticking rules’ aside (which might deny it a place on the list of the purist), this would be a fabulous bird to see in British waters!
6 September 2016
