Nazca Booby

About the Nazca Booby

The Nazca booby (Sula granti) is a large seabird of the booby family, Sulidae, native to the eastern Pacific. First described by Walter Rothschild in 1902, it was long considered a subspecies of the masked booby until recognised as distinct genetically and behaviorally in 2002. It has a typical sulid body shape, with a long pointed orange-yellow bill, long neck, aerodynamic body, long slender wings and pointed tail. The adult is bright white with black and white wings, a black tail and a dark face mask.

Walter Rothschild organised and sent an expedition to the Galapagos Islands in 1897 to collect and review the animal life there. He wrote of a distinctive booby there, which he and William Robert Ogilvie-Grant diagnosed as the Peruvian booby (Sula variegata), then only known from juvenile plumage. Later, in 1902, Rothschild named it a new species, Sula granti. Rothschild later reclassified as a subspecies of the masked booby.

In 1998, Pitman and colleagues observed that Nazca boobies on Clipperton Island did not interbreed with masked boobies there. The genus Sula was previously placed in the order Pelecaniformes, but recently was collected in the family Sulidae and order... Wikipedia →