Port Townsend’s Red-footed Booby: A messenger from the future

A little after noon on July 31, 2024, Colleen Farrell, biologist aboard a Puget Sound Express vessel, identified a Red-footed Booby sitting on a channel marker off the Dungeness Spit, north of the lighthouse. (Photos here.) The following evening, the bird was reported by UW researchers aboard the Rachel Carson, anchored off Diamond Point. That night, word spread on birding social media. There had never been a Red-footed Booby anywhere in the Pacific Northwest (PNW) that people could actually go and see. Washington had three previous records – two found dead on the Dungeness Spit (2018 and 2023) and one seen on a passing vessel in the Strait of Juan de Fuca (2023).

As day broke the next morning, August 2, teen birder Liam Hutcheson and his mother, Elizabeth McManus, who had driven up from Olympia in the pre-dawn darkness, reported the bird still in the rigging of the Rachel Carson, which was still anchored off Diamond Point. (Photos and video here.) I saw that text at 6:10am. Minutes later, I was on my way. Another text. The Rachel Carson had pulled anchor and was moving. The bird was still on the vessel. According to vessel tracking apps, it was headed to Seattle. One U-turn and 20 minutes later, I was at Pt Wilson, training my scope on the Rachel Carson as it appeared off North Beach.

The morning was flat calm and misty, the water like glass. A Short-eared Owl (!) flew through my scope view, apparently crossing from Whidbey. Focusing on the rigging of the Rachel Carson, I couldn’t see any bird. As the vessel chugged passed the red buoy north of the point, I noticed a large seabird in the foreground, flying low over the water. It came to me. The Red-footed Booby, its long wingtips not quite flicking the surface of the water, banked in front of me and headed out toward a bait ball of fish and feeding frenzy of gulls. (Photos here.) It landed among them and drifted with the current north and out of view.

Two days later, on August 4, with an army of birders from across Puget Sound craning their eyes north from the point, Steve Knapp found the bird behind them, perched on the roof of the Marine Science Pier building. Since then, the bird has spent much of its time there and on the iconic Hawaiian Chieftain at a dock along the Port Townsend waterfront. It has a routine – preening for hours, then plunge diving for about 20 minutes a few times each day. Birders have come from Canada, Oregon, and beyond. Over a thousand eBird reports have been entered, many with stunning photographs. The bird has become a local celebrity and even a regular fixture at Thursday evening Concerts on the Dock.

Where did this bird come from?

Worldwide seabird expert and local resident Peter Harrison quickly identified it as a 2^nd year bird, intermediate morph. (Red-footed Boobies come in white, dark, and intermediate morphs.) On the Pacific Seabird Group listserv, more ornithologists weighed in. Peter Pyle noted that, based on molt pattern, the bird was 14 to 18 months old. It appeared to be a white morph, but with some dark features, including all dark wings and back. Longtime seabird researcher Betty Anne Schrieber recognized this pattern. “It looks to me like an immature bird from Christmas Is,” she said. Also called Kiritimati, it’s an atoll in Kiribati, roughly between Hawaii and Tahiti. Schrieber notes, “There is no other color morph there. And this is a rare color morph with the all-brown back.” While there are intermediate morphs elsewhere, Kiritimati is the best guess for the origin of this bird.

Can this bird get home?

Yes. It probably followed food here and knows exactly where it is on the planet. In Port Townsend, it is often seen among Heermann’s Gulls. These nest almost exclusively on tiny Isla Rasa in the Gulf of California. After breeding, they come up the coast and spend the summer here. They’ll be returning to Mexico shortly. They’ll be joined by thousands of California Gulls, heading south down the coast for the winter.

A booby southbound from the PNW would have lots of company. Once it hits the outer Washington coast, it would find itself among thousands of other pelagic seabirds: Brown Pelicans from Mexico, Black-footed Albatrosses from Hawaii, Pink-footed Shearwaters from Chile, Sooty and Buller’s Shearwaters from New Zealand, and even South Polar Skuas from Antarctica.

Will it make it? Maybe. This raises another question: Why did it end up in the PNW?

Why is it here?

Banding returns, or the lack thereof, from wayward songbirds on the Farallon Islands off California have shown they have a decreased likelihood of survival. Studies have shown some may suffer from mirror-image misorientation, mixing up north and south or east and west. Other wayward birds, especially seabirds, are clearly associated with storms. Hurricanes routinely bring tropical seabirds to the East Coast or even the Midwest. Some may ride on ships – boobies do – and be enticed to stay on them if they are fed fish. The Port Townsend booby is just one bird, so it’s hard to say. But it is part of a pattern.

When I started birding, 51 years ago, Red-footed Booby wasn’t even in my bird book. I had the 1966 version of the Golden Field Guide, the beige one with the three buntings on the cover. That book only mentions three boobies: Blue-faced, Brown, and Blue-footed.

In the PNW, there is little precedent for any booby. There are no Indigenous words for them. But, in the last two decades, the world has shifted. Now, four boobies – Red-footed, Nazca, Cocos, and Blue-footed – occur annually in California. The latter two have started nesting on the Channel Islands off southern California.

Prior to the 1980s, the PNW had only a single booby record – a Blue-footed found dead in 1935. Since then, boobies of one species or another have been documented 146 times. 86% of those have been in the last 11 years. This is consistent with research across the globe, which shows poleward range shifts in birds, plants, insects, and oceanic fish, to name a few. Still, even adjusting for increased reporting in recent decades, the increase in booby sightings has been among the most hair-raising and mind-boggling developments in the bird world.

The PNW’s first Red-footed Booby was in 2015. There are now 13 records. The US’s first Nazca Booby, a species from the Galapagos, was in 2013 off California. There have since been over a hundred there, plus 21 in the PNW. Likewise, Cocos Boobies (formerly Brown Boobies) have increased dramatically in the past two decades. They’ve become so expected that Washington’s bird records committee no longer tracks them.

In oceans, food webs begin with nutrients and plankton and end with fish and fish-eaters such as boobies. Water temperature is everything. This graph, which highlights the dramatic increases in worldwide sea surface temperatures in 2023 and 2024, also shows the gradual rise during the last few decades.

Each species adapts – or not – to climate change in different ways, crossing various thresholds at different times. Boobies fly long distances to find food. It remains to be seen whether they can adapt to changing ocean conditions, but it certainly appears they are trying.

The potential fates of the Port Townsend booby illustrate the uncertainties and ecological chaos of rapid climate change. During the last significant climate warming and associated mass extinction event, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) 55 million years ago, earth’s temperatures rose 5C over 5,000 years. Species had a chance to adapt and evolve, which they did. Even slow-growing oaks migrated with the climate. Not so now. The warming over the past century (approaching 1.5C) is 10 to 20 times faster than during the PETM. There is no time for evolution. Animals, such as this booby, experience it within their lifetimes, and have to make decisions in real time.

By now, the bird has no doubt noticed our rapidly shortening days. Coming from the tropics, it would have little experience with this and its implications. Two of Washington’s four Red-footed Boobies were found dead on Dungeness Spit – one was in October, rather late in the season. By the end of the century, ornithologists estimate a 50% change in bird assemblages, meaning that half the species on your latest eBird list or half the list of bird calls on your Merlin app this morning will be different. With such turnover comes all kinds of uncertainty. If the balance of an ecosystem is a juggling act, half the balls are being replaced. Old prey and predators will be replaced by new and different ones.

Our celebrity booby has clearly adapted to the local cuisine, eating sand lance, but other risks are lurking. Port Townsend’s only other booby was a Cocos (Brown) Booby photographed in February 2021 dead in the claws of an eagle. Though a sample size of one, if boobies are indeed defenseless against eagles, that may mean a limit to how far north they can safely forage. There are undoubtedly other risks that neither the booby nor I have contemplated.

As of this writing, Port Townsend’s Red-footed Booby is still here, still preening and diving and eating daily. Let’s hope it realizes that this is only its summer home and departs this fall. If it doesn’t return next year, odds are another will show up soon.