Rare bird sighted off coast of Dutchess County

The crew of the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater recently caught sight of a brown booby (Sula leucogaster) off the coast of Germantown, the first recorded sighting of the large seabird in Dutchess County.

While the brown booby is a rare summer and fall visitor, and this is the first recorded sighting of the bird in Dutchess County, it’s not the first sighting in the Hudson Valley – the first record of the species occurred in Orange County in August 2019, also reported by the crew of the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater. Another sighting occurred near Esopus Meadows in August of 2021.

“The bird circled around the sloop and above the stormy gray river, captivating us with its elegant flight,” Chloe Grey Smith said of the July 18 sighting. “It then continued south alongside the sloop to Saugerties where it perched on the bowsprit for almost half an hour. After a while it left but we spotted it again farther south, resting on a buoy close to the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge.”

The French Guiana-native seabird has a wingspan of over 4.5-feet and sharp, jagged beaks they use to dive-plunge into the water to catch small fish near the surface. The bird typically lives across the Caribbean, but “as a result of global warming, the brown booby has increasingly been moving further north both along the coast and inland, into seas formerly too cold for it,” Tom Lake of the Hudson River Almanac notes.


 

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