The weather may have been windy and wet, but it turned out to be a magnificent weekend for birding. At least for the lucky few who were able to see a huge, spectacularly rare tropical seabird that visited some well-known vistas from Hyannis to Chatham on Saturday. It was a Magnificent Frigatebird, the original pirate of the Caribbean.
In fact, it may have been as many as three or even more Magnificent Frigatebirds. In the modern way we now learn of birds, word came to the Cape Cod birding chat group that someone on Facebook had posted photos of a Magnificent Frigatebird coming in to roost on the flagpole in front of Chatham Lighthouse at dusk on Saturday. Someone else pointed out that others had reported one at Kalmus Beach in Hyannis earlier in the day in an eBird report that included excellent photos. Yet another birder later filed an eBird report of three frigatebirds heading north in Chatham Harbor on Saturday evening.
Enterprising - and early rising - local birder Mary Keleher headed to the flagpole in Chatham early Sunday morning, arriving at 4:45 AM to find the bird still roosting there. It was gone by 5:30, never to be seen again – others checked likely locations all day with no luck. The early birder definitely got the worm in this case.
There are about 15 Magnificent Frigatebird records for Massachusetts, but only 8 are officially accepted, including 5 or 6 here in the Cape and Islands. Most recently, and bizarrely, Jeremiah Trimble found a frigatebird sitting on a telephone wire at Sciasconset on the Nantucket Christmas Bird Count – the date was January 2, 2022. Another Magnificent Frigatebird kicked off Vern Laux’s first ever Nantucket Birding festival in style back in October of 2011, establishing a pattern of premium-level rare birds found each year of this short-lived but potent birding festival, with other years boasting eastern North America’s first Gray-tailed Tattler and a Calliope Hummingbird.
If you’ve seen Magnificent Frigatebirds, they were probably flying flapplessly out your car window as you went over a bridge in Florida, or some similar scene on your Caribbean vacation. They are startlingly large, with long, pointed wings and a huge, forked tail. Their seven-foot wings give them the largest wing area to weight ratio of all birds, allowing them to float around all day like a beach kite, barely needing to flap. The bill is long and hooked, perfect for snatching slippery fish and squid from the surface, which they apparently do without wetting so much as a feather. Though they mostly glide about languidly like they have nowhere special to be, they often acrobatically pursue other seabirds, like boobies, to steal their fish, like jaegers do with terns around here in late summer.
My favorite, though increasingly hazy memory of frigatebirds was from when I was camping on a desert beach on the west coast of Mexico as a younger man. I arrived at my campsite after dark. Sunrise revealed over a hundred of these massive seabirds soaring around over saguaro cactuses, providing some cognitive dissonance that it took a minute to shake off.
No one has seen the Cape frigatebirds again, but at this time of year the next rarity is right around the corner. The weather’s great, the traffic’s better, the beaches are more open, and the birds are on the move. I know we’re all busy now that it’s back to school and work time, but sometimes you just have to say “frigate” and go looking for birds.
