Tropical bird lost its way in Kansas City. Birders watch with awe, and some fear
Teresa McCray parked herself about 20 feet from the edge of the Kauffman Foundation pond Wednesday, motionless, with a camera bag at her feet.
She knows that it will be hours before she moves — the only thing that would have drawn here draw her away were the potential thunderstorms.
For almost 20 years, McCray has been watching and photographing birds. In her purse, she keeps a Ziploc bag full of memory cards. She’s populated 130 photo albums, each photo a moment captured that could have been hours in the making — she likes to sit and wait for a bird to take off or land.
But she’s never photographed a brown booby. Certainly not in Missouri, seeing as the seabird’s closest potential habitat would be Florida.
Since the weekend, birders from all over the Kansas City metro have stopped by the pond at 4801 Rockhill Road to see the yellow-footed bird. What was a crowd over the weekend is now a few people stopping by every hour. But it’s clear from the binoculars and cameras around birders’ necks that interest in the tropical friend hasn’t died yet.
“This is rare, that’s why I came all the way out here . . . it’s like seeing a dinosaur, you know?” McCray said. “It’s something you’ve never seen before. This is a good specimen, this bird is. Because, look at it — it’s a booby! It’s not even from these parts, and we’re sitting here looking at it. It’s a miracle.”
One birdwatcher mentioned that he knew of at least two dozen people who had stopped by over the past few days. He’d found out about the bird through a Facebook group called Kansas Rare Birds and Notable Sightings, where birders can share knowledge and sightings, and help each other.
The nonmigratory bird is common in the Caribbean but is rare even in Florida, where birders speculate this crash-landed booby came from. CornellLab states that seeing one in the U.S. at all scarcely happens.
The bird watcher speculated that the white-beaked bird got swept up in a storm and landed in Missouri, where it has lost its way back home. He says that its Missouri maps are blank.
He brought a long-lens camera to photograph the brown booby after being away over the weekend. He wasn’t sure if it would still be there. He kept a respectful distance to keep the bird from spooking — something that he recommends anyone who come visit the bird do.
A photographer first, he picked up birding during COVID-19 as a way to be outside and away from others. He began sending pictures of the birds scouted out to his father and friends in an out-of-state senior living space. His father had always been a birdwatcher.
Even though his father passed, he still sends pictures to his friends. They’ve developed a game where he sends a recent birdwatching picture, and his father’s friends have to guess what bird it is. He’s not sure if they’ll be able to guess the brown booby’s identity — it wouldn’t be someone’s first guess for a photo taken in Missouri.
Both he and McCray shared concern about the brown booby surviving in an unknown space. McCray has told the other birder that when she came to visit the seabird Monday, it dove into the pond. She wasn’t sure if it caught food, and she is just as concerned about it as excited.
The two conversed about whether it could make it through the winter — the previous birds from Florida that also lost their way and landed across Midwest, including in Kansas City, didn’t. The bird could be supervised by or picked up by a wildlife rehabilitation or discover center, or could make its way back south in another storm, the two concluded. Otherwise, it might deteriorate.
“I’m sure they’re keeping an eye on it so it doesn’t deteriorate and just die here, because that would be a terrible loss — a lovely bird like this to just die,” McCray said in discussing rescues like Operation Wildlife in Linwood, Kansas, potentially intervening.
But for now, the booby seems healthy and pretty much unbothered by the swarms of people paying it a visit — one of whom is Amy Gobbini, who briefly stopped from her nearby workplace to snag a picture on her phone. She’s not much a photographer, but is big into birds. She’s even travelled to see specific species.
“Other than migratory ocean birds, we don’t really see ocean birds here,” Gobbini said. “But he definitely looks like a cousin to a seagull or something, so I’ll have to do some more research on him and learn a little more about him.”
She began birdwatching alongside her brother. The two have a competition every year to see how many bird varieties the two can spot — and she says the booby may just push her over the edge to take this year’s win.
After all, her brother would have to travel to at least Florida to see a brown booby himself.
