Readers’ wildlife photos

Thanks to kind and diligent readers, I have a few batches left.

Today’s photos come from Ephraim Heller, who sends us today the birds of Little Tobago. Ephraim’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on the.

Jerry’s pathetic plea for photos activated my guilt neuron, so I composed the following story. It is all true, apart from the moral judgments and anthropomorphism.

About 100 miles off the coast of Venezuela lies the island of Tobago, and just off its coast lies the wildlife sanctuary island of Little Tobago. Once upon a time, there lived on the island peaceful colonies of brown boobies (Sula leucogaster) and red-billed tropicbirds (Phaethon aethereus).

The boobies happily sat on their nests:

The tropicbirds, too, spent their days in domestic bliss on their nests:

Just for the joy of it, the tropicbirds would sail through the air, riding the thermals and admiring their splendid tail feathers:

Whenever they were hungry, the boobies and tropicbirds would roam the seas for many miles around Little Tobago, scooping up small fish. When their eggs hatched, they would fill their crops with fish to carry back to their nests and regurgitate for their chicks.

But one day evil entered Little Tobago’s Eden in the form of the Magnificent Frigatebirds (Fregata magnificens):

Frigatebirds live in the air, feeding and sleeping while aloft. The word frigatebird derives from the French mariners’ name for the bird: La Frégate– a frigate or fast warship. These mean, nasty frigatebirds were indeed warlike, as they were the worst class of birds: kleptoparasites. Because they were named magnificent frigatebirds, they felt themselves entitled to everyone else’s food. In fact, they were so mean that they would even steal food from each other:

While frigatebirds could scoop up their own food or eat carrion, the frigatebirds of Little Tobago attacked the boobies and tropicbirds when they were most vulnerable, as they returned to the island with their crops full of food for their babies. The frigatebirds grabbed the boobies and tropicbirds and shook them and pecked at them until they regurgitated their food in midair. The frigatebirds then swooped down and caught the regurgitated food before it hit the ocean surface.

These Frigatebirds had one weakness: their feathers are not waterproof, so they could not float on the ocean surface because if their feathers became waterlogged they drowned. The boobies often evaded the frigatebirds by diving into the ocean water, where the frigatebirds could not follow.

Sadly, the poor little tropicbirds had no such defense. To add insult to injury, the frigatebirds shook the tropicbirds so hard that many of them lost their beautiful tail feathers, which hurt their feelings as they were rather vain avians:

Will the cute tropicbird chicks go hungry?

Won’t you help us?