Did this red-footed booby really fly all the way from the Galapagos to the UK?

It’s not every day that a red-footed booby lands on the shores of Britain. Yet on Sunday 4 September, a bedraggled specimen came to rest on the beach at St Leonards-On-Sea near Hastings on the south coast of the UK. According to a story on the Daily Mail website, the wayward bird was “6,000 miles from home”.

The blown-off-course booby was spotted by local resident Gail Cohen who was having brunch in her beach hut with a friend. She’d seen the species on a trip to the Galapagos so knew instantly that it was from far afield. “It went to sleep on the beach and I knew there was definitely something wrong so I called the rescue service,” she told the Mail. Since then, the RSPCA at nearby Mallydams Wood has been giving round-the-clock intensive care to the rarity.

Meanwhile, there has been plenty of speculation over where the bird came from and how a species that doesn’t migrate could have ended up so far from home. The Mail went definitive and claimed the bird had to have come from the Galapagos. But this is almost certainly not the case.

The red-footed booby Sula sula is found on tropical islands in most oceans, with the exception of the eastern Atlantic, so it could have come from virtually anywhere. Except that this species is notable for coming in three main flavours or morphs. The most common is the white morph. There is a white-tailed brown variety. There is also a full-on brown version. The St Leonards-On-Sea specimen is clearly white-tailed brown.

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In the Galapagos, red-footed boobies are almost exclusively full-on brown. “I don’t think this bird is coming from Galapagos,” says Matthieu Le Corre, an ecologist at the University of Reunion Island who has studied red-footed boobies in the Indian Ocean. “Your bird has a white tail so it is not a bird from the Pacific.” It’s more likely that the rogue red-foot has come from somewhere like the Antilles in the western Atlantic, he suggests, “which is a shorter journey to Sussex”.

Even then, this is a distance of well over 4,000 miles, around 40 times further than a red-footed booby would normally fly on a foraging trip. “The red-footed booby often sits on vessels at sea, especially if they are exhausted,” notes Le Corre. “It may have been the case with this one.”

However it managed to reach the UK, the bird was understandably weak, thin and dehydrated when it arrived. By the end of last week, the staff at RSPCA Mallydams Wood had managed to feed him some sprats by hand and he’d put on some weight. But an update from Monday afternoon did not bring such good news.

“Sadly over the weekend his condition deteriorated and he has gone off his food. Our staff are now tube feeding him and trying a variety of fish to see if they can spark his interest in food again.”