Blue-footed Booby, Sula nebouxii


Blue-footed Booby
The bird shown in the top three pictures on this page was roosting at Los Islotes, islands in the Gulf of California, which I visited on a Lindblad tour in January 2005. This semi-tropical sea is normal habitat for Blue-footed Boobies, famous for the male's comical foot-displaying courting ritual, a great attraction on the Galapagos Islands where about half of the world population nests. This species is occasionally seen in North America in its post-breeding dispersal between July and October, most often in the Salton Sea in the Southern California desert, much less frequently along the Southern California coast, and extremely rarely in Central and Northern California.


Blue-footed Booby

Blue-footed Booby

Blue Booby, with Brown Booby
The adult Blue-footed Booby on the right was one of an unprecedented series of appearances of this species on the Farallon Islands, due west of San Francisco in the Pacific, during 2013-14. An adult female Brown Booby, almost as rare this far north is on the left. Blue-foots had never been reported on the Farallons before, but as many as four of them arrived during a few months, a period marked by unusually warm ocean waters off California, and during which it was also suspected that the fish supply for Blue-foots in their normal tropical and semi-tropical habitat suffered a severe shortfall. I took this picture, my first of this species in North America, on a pelagic trip in late August of 2014 from Half Moon Bay to the Farallons; that trip also provided my ever first photo of a Northern Gannet, and my first in North America of Brown Boobies.