A tropical bird that flew way off course is saved

SAN FRANCISCO -- A giant tropical bird -- a type rarely, if ever, seen in the Bay Area -- got stuck in the vortex of a hurricane-force Pacific storm this month and took a dizzying Wizard of Oz-like ride hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles off course.

That's the theory of how it ended up in a tree in Healdsburg, Calif.

The gangly, feathered galoot with a hooked beak and wingspan topping 7 feet is recovering at a Bay Area animal rescue center after a couple of bird watchers spotted it in the tree and knew right away that it was alien to Northern California.

It was positively identified Tuesday as a male juvenile magnificent frigatebird, known scientifically as Fregata magnificens. The species is known to inhabit the tropical Atlantic, the Caribbean and Cape Verde Islands. Although frigatebirds breed along the Pacific coast as far north as Mexico, they are most at home in steaming hot equatorial regions like the Galapagos Islands.

"In our entire 37 years, we've never treated one in Northern California," said Monte Merrick, a wildlife rehabilitator for the International Bird Rescue Research Center, in Cordelia, Calif. "There have been sightings, but those sightings are rare."

The big bird was spotted on Jan. 4 after a winter storm with winds of over 75 mph swept through the Bay Area, knocking out power to thousands of residents.

John and Dana Naber said they walked that day to an old dead pine tree on the Russian River where ospreys normally feed near their house in Healdsburg. Up on a branch was a bird the likes of which they had never seen before.

"This time we looked up and knew it wasn't an osprey," said Dana Naber. "We did not know what the bird was at first."

The couple ran back home, pulled out their bird books and began researching on the Internet. It looked, they concluded, like a frigatebird. But bird experts with the Audubon Society, Santa Rosa Bird Rescue and the rescue center in Cordelia treated their entreaties with skepticism.

Seeing was believing, though. The alien bird was found the next day in a tree only 50 feet from where it was first spotted. A local window washer with a 40-foot ladder helped bird rescuers from Santa Rosa capture the seabird, which was taken to the Cordelia rescue center.

The wayward flier was sick, emaciated and near death, Merrick said, noting it was 400 grams underweight with a temperature far below normal. It was placed on intravenous drugs and has been recovering ever since.

The magnificent frigatebird, so named by sailors because of the way it sails majestically through the sky, is also known as a pirate bird because of its penchant for stealing food from other seabirds. Its tactic is to chase other seabirds, forcing them to regurgitate their meals, which the frigatebird catches, more often than not, in midair.

Frigatebirds typically grow 36 inches long with a 90-inch wingspan. Males are all black. During mating season, they inflate a scarlet pouch on their throats for up to 20 minutes at a time. Females find the red balloon display irresistible.

Merrick said the fact that frigatebirds spend almost their entire lives aloft makes them especially susceptible to being blown off course. Some 1,500 frigatebirds were found in Kansas in 1988 after Hurricane Gilbert blew through the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.

Off course frigatebirds also have been reported on the Isle of Man, in Denmark and Spain. In 2005, a male was found in England, miles from the sea in Whitchurch, Shropshire. It died a few days later.

Merrick said the plan is to take the bird found in Northern California to the Los Angeles center in February and release it in San Diego, which rescuers hope is far enough south for it to find its way back to the tropics.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)