Rare sightings bring joy!

Black-headed Gull spotted in WA

When heading down to the beach, you’d generally expect to see a flock of seagulls – usually Silver Gulls, with their gleaming white plumage and ashy-grey wings. But imagine if you went to the beach and saw a gull with gleaming white plumage, ashy-grey wings and a sooty black head!

That’s exactly what happened on the beach at Geraldton, in Western Australia, early in June. The unusual gull was a vagrant Black-headed Gull – just the eleventh record of the species in Australia! It’s also the most southerly, as all previous records have been of birds seen along Australia’s northern coastline.

Black-headed Gulls usually occur across Europe and Asia, and generally don’t occur any farther south than Peninsular Thailand and the northern coast of Borneo. The bird’s arrival coincided with the passage of a savage cold front which blustered across Western Australia a day or two before. However, the chill, south-westerly gales that accompanied the front are more likely to have swept vagrant birds up from the southern reaches of the Indian Ocean rather than from somewhere up north, so the mystery of the bird’s origins remains.

“We quite often see rare or vagrant species turn up after severe weather events,” BirdLife Australia’s Dr Tegan Douglas explained. “Sometimes you expect birds to… get caught up in a weather system and end up a little bit far from home, and that’s probably what’s happened here.”

“The thing that makes it a little bit unusual with the Black-headed Gull is that this storm-front mostly came from the south-west, and this observation is already at the extreme southern end of [the gull’s] distribution.”

“The next southernmost record of that species in Australia was in Broome [about 1500km north-east of Geraldton] and that was 35 years ago!”

What followed the discovery of the Black-headed Gull was a frenzy in the twitching world, with people scrambling to get to Geraldton, a five-hour drive north of Perth, to catch a glimpse of the rare bird.

“There are twitchers who are so competitive about having the most birds on their list for the year or for the country that they will drop everything, feign sickness to get off work, book flights and drop a whole heap of cash [to see a vagrant bird],” Tegan said.

“There have been people who have flown in from the east coast and tried to arrange lifts up here with fellow birders to come and see it.”

And the gull has been very accommodating so far. Indeed, it seems content to stay where it is, at least for the moment – despite the flocks of people who’ve gathered to have a look at it. In fact, it’s so comfortable in the limelight that it’s even “fossicking for chips” with the other gulls!

Cocos Booby spotted in Australia for the first time!

While the twitchers in the West were enjoying their vagrant gull, their counterparts in eastern Australia began to flock to the Hunter Region of New South Wales instead, where a Cocos Booby had been found at Lake Macquarie. It’s the first time the species has been recorded in Australia.

Previously regarded as a subspecies of the more widespread Brown Booby, the Cocos Booby was recently reinstated as a separate species, hence the excitement in the twitching world.

These chocolate-brown-and-white seabirds mostly occur along the Pacific coastlines of Mexico and Central America, where they breed in colonies on rocky, offshore islands, and forage for fish out to sea, but they are generally confined to inshore waters. However, in recent decades, odd Cocos Boobies have ventured much farther west into the Pacific Ocean, and a handful have even established small breeding colonies in the Central Pacific (in Hawaii and on Palmyra Atoll in the Line Islands), and even farther west, on the Mariana Islands in the Western Pacific. And now a Cocos Booby has appeared in Australia, though whether it originated from the Americas or one of the nearer colonies in unknown.

All images photographed by Steph Owen.

There have been suggestions that Coco (as the bird has become fondly known) may have hitched a ride across the Pacific. Indeed, she seems very content as she loafs on her favourite boats, posing for dozens of photographers, and heading out for the occasional fishing sojourn.

“She is certainly comfortable around people!” commented Mick Roderick, BirdLife Australia’s man on the spot.

Regardless of how she arrived, Coco is now on plenty of twitchers’ lists!

Please note: Vagrant birds often arrive on Australia’s shores, but following the arrival of H5 bird flu in Australia, it’s important to remain vigilant for signs a bird may be infected. If you find a bird which appears to be sick, please avoid contact, record all possible details and immediately report it to the Emergency Animal Disease Hotline on 1800 675 888. Learn more about H5 bird flu.