Red-footed Booby

This is a most astonishing find. On the Hubbard’s farm Three Sisters a Wedge-tailed Eagle dropped a strange prey. Upon investigation a large seabird was found with a wingspan over a metre wide and a long tube-nose typical of ocean-dwelling birds. It proved to be a Red-footed Booby (Sula sula).

Boobies are similar to gannets, they fly acrobatically and dive from on high plunging into the water to catch fish. They nest on offshore islands, this species on Christmas Island among other places, often building nests in trees.

The discovery of a Red-footed Booby in Strath Creek is unexpected (of course) and actually quite sad. The species was thought only to live in tropical areas but increasingly it has been found moving further south with records increasing in NSW. This will be linked to warming sea-surface temperatures associated with the strengthening of the East Australian Current under climate change. Some oceanic birds, especially younger birds – this bird is in immature plumage – get lost and driven by storms inland where they perish. The only other records in Victoria of this species are on a beach in East Gippsland (2013) and on a basketball court in Essendon (2019). Some wit said, they must be booby-traps.

Normally birds like this are encountered on “pelagic trips”. This is when a group of birders go far out on a boat, scatter some fish oil and berley and take photos of everything that flies past. This is the only way to observe albatross, storm-petrels, prions, fulmars, shearwaters and boobies. They feed on the wing and are able to drink seawater, excreting the salt out through specialised nostrils on their beak. Collectively they are called ‘tube-noses’.

There are other species of Booby, the Brown, the Masked. In Hawaii, there is a blue-footed booby, but this one is definitely not that. It has red feet.

Finding a seabird like this on a farm 70 kilometres inland is an astonishing discovery, and it may be part of a bigger story – changing waters, changing bird movements, adaptation and adjustment and the ones that get lost along the way.

[Thanks to the experts on the Facebook page Australian Bird ID for help with this identification.]
Additional Note: The Red-footed Booby was placed in the freezer and has now been delivered to the Melbourne Museum (on 21st Feb 2025) who will examine it and archive it.