For the love of Boobies and Seagulls

I’ve been a Brighton and Hove Albion supporter for some 50 years. I’ve stood in the stands at the old Goldstone ground in the bleakest of winter weather Saturday after Saturday watching them play teams in the lower divisions. I watched Peter Ward dance circles around the opposition on the way to his record 36 goals in the old second division in 1976/7. I’ve lived through the pain of the famous “Smith must score” moment in the 1983 cup final. I’ve watched on with horror as they were reduced to playing at a Greyhound stadium after property developers sold their ground. I’ve hung onto every word on the radio as my beloved seagulls avoided relegation from the English football league by one goal. I even dedicated by 1980 PhD thesis to the seagulls in my acknowledgements! But never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d live to see them playing some of the most attractive and exciting football in the premier league while thrashing Man United 4 games in a row. The vultures have circled and taken our manager and our “best players” for ridiculous amounts of money while those self-same players have by and large failed at their new teams while we continue to develop some of the brightest young talent in football. To see them totally outclass Man Utd at Old Trafford yesterday with a starting line-up that cost under £20 million really is the stuff of dreams for a lifelong Seagull fan.

OK big gloat over and back to birding!

Four years ago I had a painful dip of the UK’s second Brown Booby in Cornwall, the first was glimpsed a few days earlier off the coast of Kent. More recently there have been a couple more records of this tropical vagrant, almost certainly driven by climate change. For the past 2 weeks or so a bird has become comparatively settled and reliable at a place called South Gare in Cleveland. With my opportunities to go birding being very limited recently, see here, It’s been most frustrating to read continuing reports and see great photos of this iconic and unusual bird.

Finally, an opportunity arose this Saturday just gone for me to undertake the 7 hour round trip to Cleveland to see it. With continuing issues at home I couldn’t leave until our horses were sorted for the day and our Doberman walked. So it was, at least by my normal standards, a comparatively late 08:30 when I left home. On route reports continued to come in of the bird perched up and showing well on a wrecked pier. This both increased my excitement level and anxiety to see this bird I had so cruelly dipped in Cornwall. Some 30 minutes out a report came in that, after showing well for 2 hours, the bird had flown off, oh no – surely the gods of birding can’t be that unkind!

South Gare is an area of reclaimed land and breakwater on the southern side of the mouth of the River Tees just outside of Redcar. It is accessed by taking the South Gare Road which is signed as private but seems to be used by all and sundry. Redcar, a place I visited last year while twitching a Greater Sand Plover, see here, is a rather drab and run down northern seaside town and the drive out towards South Gare was a bit like a scene from a post-apocalyptic Sc-Fi film with the remains of abandoned industrial activity all around. When I arrived on site I was told that the bird had relocated to a distant line of rocks in the middle of the estuary and I had to settle for distant hazy views through my scope. It soon became clear that the tide was coming in and that the bird would have to move from this rather precarious perch. I was hoping that it would relocate closer but expecting that it might go out to sea to fish. Thankfully it did the former and gave us superb flight views before it again settled of the derelict and somewhat unsteady pier.

The Brown Booby is a large eye catching seabird which is usually found in tropical seas around the globe. Adults are rich chocolate brown with starkly contrasting white bellies and central underwings. They have large pale bills and bright yellow feet. Their name comes from the Spanish word bobo, meaning stupid or daft. The Brown Booby is a strong and graceful flier. However, it's clumsy when on land, especially during take-off and landings and this apparent clumsiness, combined with a fearlessness that comes from little human contact, gave early explorers the most unfair impression that these big seabirds had small brains!

The South Gare Booby is considered to be an adult female and in flight it was truly graceful navigating the strong winds in a manner that befits its oceanic habitat. When settled on the pier it did, however, give the above description of clumsiness some merit! It spent an hour or so sat on the pier alternatively snoozing, preening and having a good look around, before it again flew off out to sea, presumably to go fishing.

The other primary avian interest from the watch point were the small groups of juvenile Skua’s coming up the estuary and making their way out to sea. The distinction between different juvenile Skua species, particularly Artic and Long Tailed is quite subtle and was not obvious to my untrained eye but more experienced seabird watchers assured me that they were Artic Skua’s, a far less than annual bird for me. I took a few distant record shots to look at in more detail when I got home and these indeed revealed some of the subtle characteristics of the juvenile Artic Skua, particularly the bill which is much paler than its Long-tailed cousin.

Commencing the long drive home I was already in a thoroughly good mood from my Brown Booby experience, but this got better and better as I listened to the goals going in at Old Trafford!