Big welcome to the littlest bobo
So many titillating bird names sound like they’ve come straight off the set of a Carry On film.
Generations of schoolboys have smirked at mentions of certain species of Paridae (the titmice) or sniggered over a particular type of cormorant (shag).
In the finest traditions of saucy seaside humour, a new species has now been added to the official list of British birds that would have Sid James cackling like a kookaburra.
The brown booby – a distant relative of the gannet – is said to derive its name from the Spanish word “bobo”, meaning a fool. Early European colonists came up with the name after discovering the seabirds waddling clumsily on New World nesting grounds.
To see brown boobies in all their elegance, it used to be the case that you would have to watch them in flight over the warm, tropical waters that stretch across the Atlantic from Central America to Africa’s Gulf of Guinea.
However, marked rises in the ocean’s temperature are increasingly encouraging young boobies to stretch their wings and wander north towards our coastal reaches.
A new paper in the ornithological journal British Birds charts booby arrivals during the summer of 2019, when birds started to be seen by lucky birdwatchers around the South Coast.
The first record was a brief sighting of a distant booby at Swalecliffe, Kent, on August 19, followed days later by a second bird, which lingered for a week near the popular Cornish resort of St Ives.
A third booby was spotted off The Lizard that September and then another, 25 miles off the Cornwall coast the same month. The fifth record came from the Isle of Wight in May 2020.
The British Birds journal says warming of the Atlantic’s average surface water temperature has been evident since 1990, with rises around our shores six times the global average and expectations that it will carry on increasing.
“Given such predictions, we can perhaps expect the recent run of tropical Atlantic and Caribbean seabirds reaching Britain to continue,” the journal says.
The brown booby is said to derive its name from the Spanish word for fool
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