Beached booby in Brighton

A dog walk on her local beach took an astonishing twist for Clodagh Bannerman when she encountered a county first.

Brown Booby: Hove, East Sussex, 2 January 2022

ON 2 January, a normal Sunday morning dog walk along an overcast seafront took an unexpected turn when my dog Marla made an exotic discovery on the beach in Hove, not far from the old pier.

The beach was showing signs of the previous few days’ stormy seas. We had found an enormous live sea snail, a lot of plastic debris and, most strangely, a whole pineapple – plenty for the dog to get interested in. I didn’t pay attention to her scampering away and was quite startled to notice her sniffing round a fairly substantial bird, which was hugging the cobbled wall at the back of the beach. A small group of people had collected at a short distance.

I was expecting it to be a European Herring Gull – which are omnipresent in Brighton – but noticed with surprise it was the wrong colour, this bird being a dark and slightly dusty brown. It also had fuller tail feathers than a gull, which became slightly darker towards the tips. It was lovely,