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This week we were very lucky to have the third record of a Great Frigatebird for Broome. We had seen one of the other two recorded birds during a cyclonic event a few years ago. This was a very odd record, as we didn’t get the strong winds associated with Cyclone Iggy, as it was [...]

Last week I introduced the Great Frigatebird, one of five species of man-o-war bird. I got rather carried away showing all the plumages you can see around a breeding colony, which means I had to split my post on the species into two. Here I’ll finish off what I started, looking at the lives of [...]

I’ve always thought there is something prehistoric about frigatebirds, as something about their shape evokes in my mind the shape I imagine the later pterosaurs would cut in the late Cretaceous skies. This association belies the advanced and highly sophisticated adaptations the family has evolved for a life of wandering, hunting and, yes, piracy on [...]

In the final version of Walt Whitman’s famed poetry collection Leaves of Grass – the “Deathbed Edition” - there is a poem dedicated to the Magnificent Frigatebird, or, as Whitman knew it, the Man-of-War-Bird.  ”To the Man-of-War-Bird” was actually first published nearly a quarter-century earlier in the British literary paper, The Athenaeum, and was reprinted in 1878 as ”Thou Who Hast [...]

There I was (I’ve been reading Thurber) on board a boat off Baja California, reveling in cormorants (three species!), Brown Pelicans, and the northernmost Brown Booby breeding colony on this side of the Pacific. Which, naturally, got me to thinking about the newly erected order Suliformes, a development I mentioned in my December column, 2010′s [...]

When I posted a short blurb a couple of days ago about my plans to scour the south shore of Long Island in the wake of Tropical Storm Hanna I had anticipated maybe finding a good tern or perhaps a shearwater near the shore.  But after an hour or so of searching Jones Beach frustration [...]