Rare Cruise Visitor a First for Barbados

As thousands of visitors sail into our beautiful island via cruise ships, they're contributing to a neglected aspect of Barbados’ birdlife: pelagic birding, which is the spotting of birds that spend most of their life far out to sea. Just last month, a keen-eyed guest aboard a cruise ship added three bird species of this type to the 2024 bird checklist. These were the Red-footed Booby (Sula sula), Masked Booby (Sula dactylatra), and Brown Booby (Sula leucogaster).

Gray-breasted Crake photo by Cindy Johnson

A checklist with images, posted on ebird.org by Cindy Johnson, a cruise ship guest, amazed local birders on February 8th. The bird in the image was not pelagic, but a Rail, like our Common Gallinule, that lives in marshes and mangroves. This bird was small, with a grey chest, greyish brown upperparts, and barred underparts. It was a Gray-breasted Crake (Laterallus exilis), a bird found in Trinidad, Central and South America. We may never find out how the bird got on the ship, but Cindy wondered if it came from Iles de Salutes, French Guiana, or the Amazon river ports - likely previous stops for her ship. Her sighting is the first record of this species in Barbados.  

This is not the first time a new or rare bird species seen on the island was credited as ship-assisted and most likely will not be the last. Thanks to keen birders like Cindy this Gray-breasted Crake’s voyage even though left several questions unanswered is a step in helping scientists understand these all too common events.  Sop Birders stay vigilant, continue to share your sightings, and enjoy your birding.