Red footed Booby -day 3

The first photograph on this post was one of the toughest. It shows a Booby chasing a flying fish. This was fast action stuff, the entire sequence happening in seconds.
These birds are nimble enough to snare flying fish from the air and this was their only mode of hunting the entire 3 days that I spent with them. Boobies seemed to be well adapted for diving because of their long bills, lean and aerodynamic body. These birds have closeable nostrils, and long wings which they wrap around their bodies just before entering the water. Once they spot a fish,with their sharp eyes from above they just swoop onto the prey and immediately swallow it. I never saw any of these birds carry a fish in their beak,so photographing it was out of question.
They hunted twice a day early morning just after sunrise and evening about 2 hours prior sunset. Some even hunted at noon. Their hunting session lasted for about 2 hours and rest of the time they spent socialising on board mostly on the ships forward mast.

Red Footed Booby - day 2

The 5th photograph from the top, is of special interest. I Managed to photograph a booby just about making a Guano deposit.
Like I told yesterday, the boobies are mostly white, like featured in the first photograph but they also appear in a variety of color morphs. The colours range from individuals that are all white except for blackish on the wing, to individuals that are entirely dark brown,like the last photograph. Some birds fail to fit neatly into any of the typical colour morph categories and many variations exist. Colour morphs do not segregate these birds reproductively or geographically and individuals representing several morphs breed in a single colony and live together just like what I encountered and have featured in these photographs.
When I referred my dictionary for the etymology of the name for this bird, it said this "It is so called on account of its apparent stupidity -- unafraid of men, it allows itself to be caught by a simple and undisguised approach"

Red Footed Booby

North of the Comoros, enroute to Kenya our ship was visited by a big flock of these Red footed booby birds. They spent about three days on board, during which they hunted flying fish that popped out of water as the water was disturbed by the ship's bow wave.
The three days gave me so much of an opportunity to photograph them, that I have decided to feature these birds for the next three days on this blog.
The Red footed booby (Sula Sula) is the smallest of the boobies and have brilliant red webbed feet.
In the above photograph there are a few boobies which are white, some are brown and some Intermediate. More about that in tomorrows post.