The
3rd September 2003 saw myself and 30 guests from The
Company of Whales on day two of one of our twenty five
four-day cetacean and seabird holidays, which we operate
throughout spring, summer and autumn in the Bay of Biscay.
We utilise the 37,500-ton vessel Pride of Bilbao that sails
twice weekly from Portsmouth to Bilbao as our holiday base
and observe marine wildlife from the Monkey Island of the
vessel. This superb position allows uninterrupted views
that are a problem if viewing from the heli-deck or side
decks of the vessel. I had been at sea since 9th August
but the Bay was proving to be extremely quiet for seabirds.
A couple of close and showy Little Shearwaters, a handful
of Cory's Shearwaters, several Sabine's Gulls but absolutely
no Great Shearwaters just about summed up our ornithological
highs and lows. It was, however, proving once again to be
an excellent season for cetaceans and having identified
the second-ever True's-beaked Whale to be seen in the wild
just two days previously, I was more than content!
Having rounded the French coast off Ouessant we headed
towards the shelf edge and were soon tracking south on a
slight divert to run along the 1000 metre contour. We had
encountered some magnificent pods of Common Dolphins earlier
in the day and were hopeful for more sightings, but a force
six to seven south-easterly wind made finding cetaceans
difficult to say the least.
At
1644 GMT and at ships position 46º 26' 004º 04'
(approx. 150km west of Croix-de-Vie, Vendée, France)
a gannet-like bird drifted in from the port side of the
vessel and started to cruise about 30 metres above us. We
always get small flocks of Gannets coming in to 'wind-surf'
above Monkey Island so I paid very little attention to the
bird, in order to continue scanning ahead for cetaceans.
As the bird came a little closer, something seemed very
odd. The secondaries were all dark and so I jested to my
assistant guide Mike Weedon and to trip participant Dawn
Russell that the bird was a Masked Booby and then went off
on a complete tangent to inform the group just how conceivable
it could be to mis-identify a variant fourth year Gannet
showing black secondaries as a Masked Booby! As I was doing
that and showing our travellers illustrations of variant
Gannets, the bird dropped right in front of us and flew
down the port bridge-wing out of sight. None of the 30 or
so independent birders on deck 11 paid any attention to
the bird and so I carried on scanning ahead for cetaceans.
The day was proving to be a good one for migrant passerines landing on the ship and we had already recorded a Serin and an Ortolan among commoner migrants such as Wheatear, Willow Warbler and Yellow Wagtail. Clive Martin was in the bridge and contacted me via radio to come and identify a strange bird that had just landed on the railings beneath his position. Assuming it to be another passerine, I walked to the port side window and was amazed to see 'our' bird sat right in front of me asleep. The head was partially obscured as it was tucked in the wing but from what I could see of the basal region, the bill was not Gannet-like at all. The bird also lacked the bluish orbital of a Gannet and appeared very dusky around the eye. I had only ever seen the form of Masked Booby that occurs in the Galapagos Islands and I was pretty sure at this stage that this bird had to be just that. I could hardly contain my excitement and rushed back to Monkey Island to grab my camera. I told Mike that I was fairly sure the bird was a Masked Booby and returned to take a series of pictures. One feature I remembered being diagnostic of Masked Booby was the presence of black on the scapulars - after several minutes the bird woke up to show a both a classic bill and head pattern and black scapulars during a wing stretch. I could hardly contain my excitement and left the bridge to inform all onboard that there was a Masked Booby on the bridge wing! The bird stayed onboard for the rest of the evening, often taking short flights directly beneath us, allowing a series of photographs to be taken of the bird in flight.
It
stayed with us overnight and at 0530 GMT the following morning,
Nicholas Race and Gary Jenkins saw the bird leave Pride
of Bilbao and enter Santurtzi harbour, to the north of Bilbao.
I sent text messages to several of my guides to inform them
of our sighting and called Steve Gantlett in the United
Kingdom in order to alert any Spanish birders in the vicinity
of Bilbao. We spent around three hours on the hill above
Santurtzi and returned to the boat around 1015 GMT. Despite
a good search of the surrounding harbour we could not find
the bird.
Masked Booby occurs almost throughout the tropical and subtropical oceans (though eastern Pacific birds may well be split in the future), except in the eastern Atlantic. Birds breeding in the Caribbean region are the closest to western Europe and occasionally wander north to warm southern Gulf Stream waters off the eastern seaboard of the USA - there have been some 25 records off the North Carolina area by 1998 (Brinkley & Patterson 1998).
The only previous Western Palaearctic records of Masked Booby are an adult at Puerto Sotogrande, Cadiz, Spain on 10th October 1985, and perhaps the same bird at Torremolinos, Malaga, Spain, on 14th December 1985, plus two adults or near-adults reported together seen from a ferry between Madeira & Malaga, c300 miles west of Casablanca, Morocco, on 9th November 2002.
This individual thus constitutes the third confirmed record
of Masked Booby for the Western Palaearctic, the third for
Spain and the first for France.
Reference
Brinkley, E. S. & & Patterson, J. B. 1998. Seabirds
of the southern Gulf Stream. Birding World 11: 421 - 429.