The first Rare Bird post that’s about a rare bird is likely the rarest sighting that’ll ever be featured here. It’s not one of the rarest species, but it’s difficult to imagine another sighting this strange.
On Jan. 4, 2022, a songbird landed on a boat in the Southern Ocean.
The sailor was Leiv Poncet and the vessel was Peregrine, a 39-foot steel-hulled sailboat. The bird was a Prothonotary Warbler — nicknamed the “swamp candle” after its radiant yellow plumage, a denizen of Colombian forests that nests in tree hollows in the swamps of the eastern United States.
Poncet was supposed to be there. The bird was not.
Unlike the warbler, Poncet was familiar with these waters. He had grown up aboard his parents’ ocean-voyaging sailboat, and even among sailors, he has an unusual affinity for the remote latitudes around the Antarctic. His mother, Sally, a scientist who studied ocean-wandering seabirds like albatrosses and petrels, has been sailing these southern seas with her husband Jerome since they met in the 1970s during his circumnavigation.
Poncet’s older brother was born on his parents’ boat in South Georgia, just about 500 miles east of where this bird was recorded. When not aboard Peregrine, Poncet lives on a sheep farm in the southern Falkland Islands about 475 miles west.
As an adult, Poncet circumnavigated the globe around this latitude, which sailors call the Roaring Forties after the strong westerly winds that circle this part of the world over nearly uninterrupted open ocean.
I wasn’t able to reach him — he’s probably out on the ocean somewhere or on some remote island — but here’s how he described the encounter in his eBird report (with photos):
Bird was heard vocalising whilst flying around sailboat. … After circling the boat for a few minutes after it was first seen, it landed on the rail, the deck and in other locations several times. It appeared very wary and would fly off again as soon as I came on deck. … After about 2 hours of frequent landings on the boat, it disappeared.
The location where Poncet recorded the bird — approximately 52 degrees south, 48 degrees west — is so remote that eBird lists the jurisdiction merely as “High Seas,” country code “XX,” a part of the world where penguins are expected, not parulids.
“The lostest bird,” Audubon’s Nicolas Gonzalez called it in an April 6 tweet.
Extremely rare sightings like these — especially birds that land on ships — are often synonymous with doom. If a bird lands on a ship, it was probably going to land in the water; after it takes off again, it will likely end up there anyway.
I remember reading as a child accounts of Ruby-throated Hummingbirds that alit upon oil rigs to rest in the course of their otherwise nonstop migration across the Gulf of Mexico. Part of me wanted to grow up to work on those oil rigs just so I could put out a one-to-four sugar water mixture just so that those hummingbirds might have a slightly better chance at survival, because I could not bear thinking about what might happen to them if no one helped.
Birders, especially those who chase rarities, reckon with an uncomfortable juxtaposition — the greater the misfortune of the bird, the greater the fortune of the birder.
The Common Cuckoo I chased outside Providence, Rhode Island, in November 2020 was probably the rarest bird I’ve ever seen. I tried not to think about how it would never find its way home, how it would most likely die in the New England winter.
But at least there’s usually some chance of finding a body. We know what happened to the Great Black Hawk that froze in Maine, the Corn Crake struck by a car in Long Island, the Ross’s Gull nabbed by a Peregrine Falcon in coastal California (although these are the exceptions, not the rule). What captivates me about ship vagrants like this Prothonotary Warbler is that we truly have no way of knowing what happened to them. All we can do is wonder.
In early January, this bird should have been spending the winter in Colombia. More than 90% of the world’s Prothonotary Warblers winter there, the country with the world’s greatest bird diversity, in coastal mangroves and inland forests. But when this bird flew south for the winter, it kept on flying.
It departed the shores of the southern United States — either from Louisiana for the Yucatán or from Florida for Cuba — to South America, where it joined small flocks with others of its kind.
It would have stayed with them if not for some strange conviction to keep going. Strange as it was, the conviction was irresistible — how could it not be, if it drove this bird to fly a thousand miles offshore toward the world’s coldest waters?
Setting out from the coast of South America very much in the wrong direction, not knowing where it was, not knowing why it was there, surely knowing on some biological level it would die there, this bird knew above all else that it had to be there, for some accident of biology and physics and corrupted instinct mandated that it should.
Surely it died out there.
For our purposes, that is what we will assume: the overwhelmingly likely outcome that this bird perished somewhere in the Southern Ocean, farther from the mainland than New York City is from Chicago.
Even if the bird made it to land, it would have died soon after. On the off chance that it made its way to an island on the fringes of the Southern Ocean — turning back toward the Falklands or pressing on toward South Georgia — it still would have found none of the insects it was used to foraging on, and would surely starve. It was doomed by the time it reached that boat, no matter how lucky it was after it left.
But warblers don’t live that long anyway (the oldest Prothonotary Warbler on record was barely 8 years old). This one had already accomplished the feat of surviving long enough to make it out of the nest, to migrate south in the fall — most don’t even make it that far — then journeying to lands, then seas, none of its species had ever seen. And then, for the man on this boat, this bird offered two hours of brilliance before vanishing back into the fog.
Fluttering above those frigid waters, this Prothonotary Warbler glimmered one last time for the world to see before it fluttered off again into the gray mist. Perhaps, in its last moments, sinking into the gray sea, perhaps the Southern Ocean Prothonotary Warbler thought back to that strange, beautiful encounter on the sailboat Peregrine. 🪶