Brown Noddy

About the Brown Noddy

The Brown Noddy is a backwards tern - dark chocolate-brown all over with a frosty white cap, the exact negative of the familiar white-bodied, black-capped terns of the beach. Add a long wedge-shaped tail and an easy, buoyant flight and it is unmistakable - if you can get to where one lives, which is the hard part.

Noddies are birds of the tropical open ocean, feeding far from land by snatching small fish and squid driven to the surface by tuna and other predators below; they patter and hover over the schools rather than plunge-diving. The name comes from their courtship, in which pairs bow and nod to each other repeatedly.

They breed in colonies on tropical islands - in the United States, most famously the tern colonies of the Dry Tortugas off Florida - building rough nests in bushes and on ledges rather than on open sand.

For Texas the Brown Noddy is a storm bird and pelagic prize: small numbers wander the deep Gulf in the warm months, seen from far-offshore boat trips, and tropical storms occasionally push exhausted birds to the beaches and bays. Most state records come in a hurricane's wake - one of the reasons Texas birders, a little guiltily, watch the tropics each summer.