The Boobies and the Flying Fish

It takes a moment to recognize a booby in flight.  On the ground, with their awkward gait, semi-vacant stare, and oversized and often oddly colored feet, they appear to be poorly designed to survive in nature.  Some, especially the blue-footed kind, perform comical dances, build nests with total disregard for safety and seem oblivious to most of their surroundings.  The village idiots of the avian world.

But in the air they are transformed.  Boobies become sleek hunters.  They glide gracefully above the water looking for a meal below.  Once lunch is spotted, they tip themselves vertically, tuck into aerodynamic position and pierce the water like a thunderbolt. I’m sure their prey have no idea what’s coming.  So whatever respect they may lose on the ground is more than regained in flight.

So, when I opened the shade of our room the other morning, it took me a moment to identify what was gliding through the air at eye level and no more than 15 feet away as a booby.  This was a masked booby, predominately white with a black mask around the eyes and black along the trailing fringe of the wings.  The bird and its friends were flying in a repeating pattern of slowly gliding along the sides of the ship from back to front, crisscrossing the bow a few times and then circling around behind the ship again.

A flying fish is another peculiar creature.  Having the appearance of half fish and half insect, it’s one of my favorite things to watch for at sea.  It can hurl itself out of the water and then its unique pectoral fins can flutter rapidly, allowing it to fly or glide above the wave crests.  It’s fun to watch how far they can stay airborne.  Under the right conditions, they can soar for dozens of feet and maybe hundreds.  So, flying fish can evade predators chasing them in the water by escaping through the air.

When a ship bears down on a flying fish, its natural reaction is to take off through the air to get away.  When a ship sails through a school of flying fish they can scatter in all directions from the bow.

The boobies seem to know this. 

They follow ships.  As they glide along the side of the ship, if they spot something in the water, they will pounce.  But, once they make it to the bow, they will linger there for a while, looking to see if any flying fish try to evade the on-coming ship.   

The flying fish seem to feel they’re safer in the air than in the water when something is chasing them.  Either that, or they’re unaware that there is a bird flying overhead.  They will continue to fly as far as they seem able to, regardless of whether there’s an airborne predator nearby.  So when the booby spots the flying fish, rather than the aerodynamic plunge, it will swoop down to the surface and try to snag the erratically flying fish in midair.  Sometime it succeeds, but usually the fish lands back in the water and escapes.

Watching from above, it’s a dance.