Whenever I take the ferry out to the Dry Tortugas, especially during the high heat of summer, I always worry, what am I going to do for four-and-a-half hours if there are no birds to speak of?
There are always a few hundred magnificent frigatebirds, 4,000 or 5,000 brown noddies, and 100,000 or so sooty terns. But what if, other than that, there are only a few brown pelicans and maybe a great blue heron around? What if I see all the species you are going to see within the first five minutes of getting off the boat?
What was I supposed to do, learn about other things? Splash around in the cool azure waters? Make new friends? Expand my horizons and explore other aspects of the fort and its environs?
Like the great Cher Horowitz once said: as if.
The worry, of course, is never warranted. In all the times I’ve been out there, I have never felt anything like boredom.
Also, there had been a few other hard-to-find species reported out there in recent weeks – a red-footed booby, a black noddy, and three or four bridled terns. All birds I had seen before, but not for a while, and always a challenge to find.
The one I really wanted to see was the red-footed booby, a species of the tropical seas that made appearances at the Tortugas every few years, and very rarely anywhere else in North America. I’d only seen one once before in 2006, and it had been a terrible look through a spotting scope through a half mile of heat shimmer. We weren’t totally sure it wasn’t a more common brown booby until we’d stared at it for half an hour and it finally scratched its head and we could see the color of its foot.
I used to have the Tortugas down: Get off the boat, drop my bags at a picnic table, cross the drawbridge, hang by the fountain for a while before working around the buttonwoods and the parade ground. After that, head back out to the helipad and all the old pilings from the coal docks that used to be on the south side of the fort. After that, walk around the exterior to the pilings from the old coaling docks on the north side of the fort. Think about the fact that one of the coaling docks was the last bit of American soil that the USS Maine touched before sailing across the Florida Straits to its doomed fate in Havana Harbor.
On this most recent trip, when I suddenly realized that, jeepers, I hadn’t been to the fort since before Hurricane Irma in 2017, I felt somewhat discombobulated, but decided to center myself by following my old routine.
I dropped my bags at a picnic table and crossed the drawbridge, wistful about the fact that Cleatus, the 9-foot American crocodile who used to lurk in the moat, had been removed from the park since I’d last been back because he made the tourists nervous. When I got to the fountain it was bone dry. Whether that was its new state, or whether they only kept it running during migration I wasn’t sure. But I sat on one of the surrounding benches for 20 minutes, hoping to see a lingering songbird, any one of the 60 or 70 species I’d seen out there before, but all I saw, other than the constant overflights of frigatebirds and terns, was a trio of cattle egrets hunting for palmetto bugs in whatever shadows they could find.
When I got to the helipad it had been roped off for the season so as not to distress the loafing sooties and noddies, which is a good thing, until someone wants to land a helicopter. But you couldn’t really get a look at the pilings of the south coal dock, which is where you usually saw good things.
I followed the moat around to the north coaling docks. The last time I was out there the concrete apron was partly occupied by equipment used by the masonry crew that was shoring up parts of the fort, but you could still get close to the pilings. Now it was roped off as a kind of storage area for rubble, floatings docks and buoys, but also some more loafing grounds for the sooties and noddies. Great for the birds, not so great for the birdwatchers.
On the way out to the north coaling docks I’d hurried by the small masses of sooty terns and brown noddies that had gathered at the edge of the path, clustering on the sea lavender and other bushes, as well as on a boat trailer and under one of the picnic tables. But I lingered on the way back, thinking about how few places in the world could get you that close to birds that spent months, even years, at sea. These tiny islands were the only bits of land they deigned to land on.
I’d been hauling around a camera, a spotting scope on a tripod, binoculars, and a water bottle, and back in the fort I sat down on a bench and just spaced out for a minute, trying to make peace with the heat. Which was when I noticed a small shadow moving through the shadows of tree branches. I looked up to find a yellow-throated warbler. Score one for the songbirds.
I soldiered on, crossed the parade grounds and climbed one of the granite spiral stairways (60 steps) up to the top of the fort so I could scour Bush Key with the scope. Which is when I realized I had about 15 minutes to get back to the boat if I wanted any lunch. So I scanned quickly, hoping to at least see the red-footed booby.
I wanted a better look than the one I saw in 2006, but all I saw was the white shape of a masked booby playing hookey from the colony over on East Key. It was about a quarter of a mile away on Bush Key, lounging with a hundred or so frigatebirds on a long patch of low bushes.
I made it back to the Yankee Freedom just in time to grab half a sandwich and some blessed air conditioning, but felt unsatisfied, as if I was missing something.
I dumped most of my gear at the picnic table and got back up, birder minimalist, with only spotting scope and binoculars, then headed back across the parade ground and up the 60 granite steps again.
I started scanning the crowd of perched magnificent frigatebirds, looking for something brown instead of black, and shaped more like a bowling pin than a vertical tear drop. Nothing. The only thing that didn’t look like a frigatebird was the white shape of the lingering masked booby.
I pulled out my phone and looked at the Sibley app.
When I’d seen the red-footed booby in 2006 I’d had a printed copy of the Sibley field guide with me, and it only had a depiction of a brown juvenile, which matched up with what we were seeing. It was such a singular rarity that I never thought much more about it.
But it turns out that red-footed boobies have multiple color morphs. The Sibley app showed not only the brown morph, but also the white morph. Which was what I had been looking at.
I was going to have to work a little harder to keep up with things out there.
