Seawatch Report - Nov 4, 2026

Editor's note: the report is still in progress, but in the meantime enjoy this exciting description of a rare Red-billed Tropicbird that flew by early in the morning!

Around 6:45 am., I had my scope trained on the buoy and was clicking Black-vented Shearwaters flying out. Two distant, mostly white birds the size of large terns entered the spotting scope, flying into the bay from the west. They were a little less than halfway from the buoy to the horizon, at a range where they could be detected with binoculars as birds that warranted a look in the spotting scope. Though the birds entered my field of view at the same time, they were not traveling together; the rear bird, an Elegant or Royal Tern, was outpaced by the lead bird, and they did not remain in the same field of view for more than a few seconds.

The first thing I noticed about the lead bird was the long, white streamer coming out of the central part of the tail. It was roughly the length of the bird sans streamer. The streamer was projecting from the central part of the tail, and seemed more substantial at the base than at the tip. The streamer was fairly level with the bird’s body, with a slight upward arch. At that distance, the streamer seemed fairly rigid – it was moving with the bird and not at all floppy. It had been ten years since I'd seen any tropicbird, but there isn't much that can be confused with a tropicbird.

The viewing conditions at Pt. Pinos shortly after sunrise are some of the best. The light is prime, and heat distortion is absent. Even though this bird was at considerable distance, we could still see a large red-orange bill, reminiscent of a Caspian Tern in size, shape, and hue. We could see a black marking through the eye, though we couldn’t make out the limits of this black. At the distance we were working with, the body patterning of the tropicbird was reminiscent of a Royal Tern: obvious black primaries, with the black extending into the primary coverts. We were too far to notice any darker barring on the back.

Though the streamer was the first thing I noticed on the tropicbird – and understandably so – the flight style was distinct, too, immediately jumping out as different from the large terns we’ve been seeing at Pt. Pinos. I think of those terns as having a deep, rowing flight. In contrast, the tropicbird had shallower, more rapid wingbeats, and the wings were held differently: on the tropicbird, they were straighter – not as swept back or as deeply crooked as on a tern. The flight trajectory itself was direct; the tropicbird continued into the bay (more towards Moss Landing than towards the harbor) and did not change altitude or direction. The terns here are often less direct, but I include this note only anecdotally. I am a little disappointed that I didn’t take the opportunity to compare the tropicbird with the tern it initially was flying with – they were not in the same field of view for long, and once I realized we were looking at a tropicbird, I temporarily forgot about terns, or shearwaters, or scoters, or anything else. We probably watched the tropicbird for a good minute before it became too distant to track. I took the opportunity to watch tern flight style closely in the subsequent Seawatch hours, comparing them with what I’d seen on the tropicbird, and the terns’ deeper wingbeats and more acute wing-on-body position stood out as different from what I’d seen with the tropicbird.

Flight style aside, the only thing with this plumage + a tail streamer that could be confused with a Red-billed Tropicbird would be a large tern trailing debris. I’ve seen, unfortunately, enough birds trailing debris to be confident that careful study has always transformed the initial “wtf is this exotic thing with the long feathers” to be a bird tangled up with something. In the case of this tropicbird, it was apparent to both me and Catherine that this streamer was, indeed, a genuine tail streamer (trust me, our initial impulse was to convince ourselves this was NOT a tropicbird – our brains just wouldn’t let us believe that it was. But we quickly got past that.

Also of note: Red-billed Tropicbirds like to eat flying fish; we seen flying fish almost every day from Pt. Pinos. A Red-billed Tropicbird was seen a few days ago, close to shore, on a Ventura County pelagic trip.

-Alison Vilag

See the full trip report here: TBA