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The red-footed booby (Sula sula) is a large seabird of the booby family, Sulidae. Adults always have red feet, but the colour of the plumage varies. They are powerful and agile fliers, but they are clumsy in takeoffs and landings.
The first seabirds evolved in the Cretaceous period, while modern seabird families emerged in the Paleogene. Seabirds generally live longer, breed later and have fewer young than other birds, but they invest a great deal of time in their young. Most species nest in colonies, varying in size from a few
The genus Sula was introduced by the French zoologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson in 1760. [3] The type species is the brown booby. [4] The name is derived from súla, the Old Norse and Icelandic word for the other member of the family Sulidae, the gannet.
The brown booby was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux in 1781. [4] The bird was also illustrated in a hand-coloured plate engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet in the Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle which was produced under the supervision of Edme-Louis Daubenton to accompany Buffon's text. [5]
The dolphin gull is a scavenger and opportunistic predator.It feeds on carrion, offal, bird eggs, nestlings, marine invertebrates and other natural food. When humans disturb nesting seabirds, it takes advantage of the absence of adult birds to raid their vacated nests.
In most seabird colonies several different species will nest on the same colony, often exhibiting some niche separation. Seabirds can nest in trees (if any are available), on the ground (with or without nests), on cliffs, in burrows under the ground and in rocky crevices. Colony size is a major aspect of the social environment of colonial birds.
Cory's shearwater (Calonectris borealis) is a large shearwater in the seabird family Procellariidae. It breeds colonially on the archipelago of the Azores in the eastern Atlantic. Outside the breeding season it ranges widely in the Atlantic. It was formerly considered to be conspecific with Scopoli's shearwater.
Frigatebirds are referred to as kleptoparasites as they occasionally rob other seabirds for food, and are known to snatch seabird chicks from the nest. Seasonally monogamous, frigatebirds nest colonially. A rough nest is constructed in low trees or on the ground on remote islands. A single egg is laid each breeding season.