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Displaying items by tag: brown booby

Bangor Marina is not the only spot on the island of Ireland that welcomed an unusual winged visitor this week – as locals in Greystones were treated to the sight of a sea bird usually found in the tropical Atlantic.

As RTÉ News reports, the large male brown booby who landed at the beach in the Co Wicklow town this past Tuesday (14 July) was the first recorded signing of the species here.

However, it was later reported that the bird appeared was suffering from exhaustion, likely a result of being blown so far off course by an Atlantic storm, and died in the care of a wildlife rescue centre in Kildare.

Niall Hatch from BirdWatch Ireland commented: “To see one in Europe is really unusual … There’s a record from 2016 on a boat offshore from the Skellig islands but no one got to see it.”

And this bird may not have been alone in his long-distance travels across the Atlantic, as suspected sightings of his fellow brown boobies have been on the rise in waters off southern England and the continent.

RTÉ News has more on the story HERE.

This story was updated on Sunday 19 July.

Published in Marine Wildlife
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Dublin Bay Sailing Club (DBSC) is one of Europe's biggest yacht racing clubs. It has almost sixteen hundred elected members. It presents more than 100 perpetual trophies each season some dating back to 1884. It provides weekly racing for upwards of 360 yachts, ranging from ocean-going forty footers to small dinghies for juniors.

Undaunted by austerity and encircling gloom, Dublin Bay Sailing Club (DBSC), supported by an institutional memory of one hundred and twenty-nine years of racing and having survived two world wars, a civil war and not to mention the nineteen-thirties depression, it continues to present its racing programme year after year as a cherished Dublin sporting institution.

The DBSC formula that, over the years, has worked very well for Dun Laoghaire sailors. As ever DBSC start racing at the end of April and finish at the end of September. The current commodore is Eddie Totterdell of the National Yacht Club.

The character of racing remains broadly the same in recent times, with starts and finishes at Club's two committee boats, one of them DBSC's new flagship, the Freebird. The latter will also service dinghy racing on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Having more in the way of creature comfort than the John T. Biggs, it has enabled the dinghy sub-committee to attract a regular team to manage its races, very much as happened in the case of MacLir and more recently with the Spirit of the Irish. The expectation is that this will raise the quality of dinghy race management, which, operating as it did on a class quota system, had tended to suffer from a lack of continuity.