Happy weekend, everyone.  I hope we’re all doing our best to take care of our mental health, although I know that isn’t always easy.  Especially when some people’s coping mechanisms boil down to a delicious canned lemon drop martini I found at the liquor store around the corner.  Anyway, birds.  This week’s bird is the magnificent frigatebird.  The magnificent frigatebird is a large seabird that lives in tropical latitudes in north and south America with an Atlantic outpost that looks to be Azores-ish.  It has long, narrow wings, a deeply forked tail, and males have a bright red gular sac in their throats that they inflate to attract a mate.  The sac takes about 20 minutes to inflate to full size.  

There are two subspecies of magnificent frigatebirds, F. m. magnificens and F. m. rothschildi.  Like an earlier bird we covered, these two subspeicies were thought to be one until a genetic study in 2011 showed that they were distinct.  F. m. magnificens only lives on the Galapagos islands.  Further genetic study has shown that rothschildi has high “gene flow,” or a sharing of genes among geographically disparate populations.  Sea birds can typically fly extremely long distances, and rothschildi is able to fly across the ithsmus of Panama to allow breeding between Atlantic and Pacific populations.  By contrast, magnificens appears not to have exchanged genes with other populations of frigatebirds for several hundred thousand years.  

Magnificent frigatebirds eat a variety of fish, squid, jellyfish and crustaceans.  They will dive to the surface of the water to scoop up their prey, but early European visitors to the Americas noted that the bird will take pains to nab a meal without actually submerging or even landing on the water, and this does appear to the be the case.  It wasn’t just something dehydrated sailors with sunstroke and ocean madness thought they saw.  The frigatebird is also a kelptoparasite, harassing other birds until they vomit up their meals and diving to catch it before the abandoned food hits the water.  That’s pretty gross, but I am here for laziness, guile and being straight up annoying as a hunting strategy.  

As previously mentioned, this seabird can fly huge distances at a stretch.  To wit: “It spends days and nights on the wing, with an average flapping rate of 2.84 beat per second,^[17] ground speed of 10 km/h (6.2 mph), covering up to 223 km (139 mi) before landing. They alternately climb in thermals, to altitudes occasionally as high as 2,500 m (8,200 ft), and descend to near the sea surface.”

The magnificent frigatebird is considered “of least concern” in terms of conservation, there are lots of them in lots of places throughout their range, but the status of the Galapagos population of magnificens may need to be revisited, per an article in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.  This population is genetically unique, comprising just a couple of thousand individuals, and is vulnerable to extinction should some catastrophe befall its tiny range.  
Have a good weekend, everyone.  Be safe out there and don’t neglect the possibility of annoying your enemies until they puke in frustration.  

Links: https://tinyurl.com/tfm3atbx, https://tinyurl.com/5xc7bz2j