A rare bird has been spotted in Massachusetts. Here’s where birders are seeing it

The summer tourist season for Massachusetts is in full swing, drawing in visitors of all shapes and sizes, not to mention species.

An American Flamingo, associated with decidedly warmer climes than Massachusetts, made a number of bird watchers very happy, and a blue whale literally made a splash off the coast of Gloucester.

Though there have been no more unusual whale sightings since then, user-reported bird watching database Ebird exploded once again on Monday with sightings of a Brown Booby in South Boston.

For non-birders, a Brown Booby is a tropical bird. The fact that it’s common in the Carribean should give most people an idea of why it would be so surprising to find it in New England.

How long has it been here?

The first report of the Brown Booby on ebird was posted Saturday, July 13 a little after 9 a.m., by user Dan O’Brien, but the actual first sighting is credited to one Laura Markley the day before in a number of notes. Meaning the animal has been in the area for at least six days now.

O’Brien wrote that the bird was perched at the end of the wooden piling when he arrived, right as it began to rain. “When the rain started to let up it joined the feeding frenzy of gulls and terns. Saw it plunge diving a few times!” he said in the details section.

Plunge diving is a distinctive behavior used by a number of fishing bird species, diving from the air to the water for fish. Unlike other fishing birds, brown boobys perform relatively shallow dives of about two meters. They are also known to steal food from other birds, known as klepto-parasitism.

O’Brien speculated that the steady southern winds over the last week, and especially Wednesday through Friday, may have brought a few southern birds north, explaining why the bird was so far out of its normal territory.

Where is the brown booby usually seen?

This species breeds on islands and coasts in the pantropical (tropics in the eastern and western hemispheres) areas of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, often on islands in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. They can also be seen on islands in the Pacific and Indian ocean and even the northern coast of Australia. A wide range but all having one thing in common – south.