White-tailed Tropicbird

About the White-tailed Tropicbird

One of the most elegant birds of the open ocean, the White-tailed Tropicbird is a slender, gleaming white seabird marked with bold black bars across the back and a black patch through the wing, trailing two impossibly long white tail streamers and carrying a yellow-orange bill. Built for a life far from land, it flies with quick, pigeon-like wingbeats over the deep blue.

Tropicbirds plunge-dive for fish and squid and spend most of their lives at sea, coming to land only to nest on remote tropical islands.

In Texas the White-tailed Tropicbird is a great rarity - a bird of the far offshore Gulf that turns up only occasionally, sometimes carried toward the coast by hurricanes and tropical storms. Any Texas sighting is a red-letter event.

A note from behind the lens: this is a bird of luck and effort, found on deep-water pelagic trips or in the wake of a storm. If one appears, be ready - track the buoyant flight, keep the exposure from blowing out that brilliant white, and hope for those tail streamers against the open sea.