OCEANIC BIRD LIFE 225 



On one of our very first days in the Banda Sea, just south of Celebes, 

 a wader the size of a dunlin, with a double white bar on the wings, rose 

 from near our ship's bows and flew off, keeping close to the surface. It 

 was a grey phalarope (Phalaropus juUcarius), a small swimming and 

 wading bird, in its tropical winter quarters. Until a few years ago, it was 

 a complete mystery where this bird, and its cousin the red-necked pha- 

 larope (Phalaropus lobatus), went to in winter. It was known that they 

 bred in the far north, both in the old world and in the new. We now 

 know that they spend the winter half-year on the open sea in various 

 tropical parts, weathering the roughest of storms and living on small 

 surface animals and plankton. A few months later - — in April — we 

 were to meet them again, flying in flocks of from 50 to 60 off Lower Cali- 

 fornia, near Mexico, on their spring migration to breeding places m 

 Alaska and northern Canada. It was the only bird of passage which we 

 saw in Indonesian waters, where marine bird life is dominated by the 

 tropical Sula, and to a lesser extent by the tropical terns. 



From Celebes we sailed due east for Torres Strait and the northern tip 

 of Australia, crossing first the Banda Sea and then the Arafura Sea. As 

 we spent a good week fishing in the Banda Sea, I had ample opportunity 

 to familiarize myself with the sea-birds there, and soon I had seen most 

 types of tropical birds, all of which I was to get to know as well as I 

 knew our European sparrows and starlings. 



In these waters, where there are so many islands, one is seldom more 

 than a hundred kilometres from land, so that, ornithologically speaking, 

 they may be regarded as coastal waters, a description well borne out by 

 the bird life. There was a greater abundance of birds than we saw any- 

 where else in the open seas of the Tropics, while the species observed 

 were mostly of coastal birds. 



The commonest was the brown booby (Sula leucogaster), a small bird 

 with warm-brown plumage except for the white posterior half of the 

 belly. Another common bird was a white booby with black wing-tips, 

 the red-footed booby (Sula sula). Both species were seen in large numbers, 

 often flocking together. We saw especially many of them while fishing in 

 the Banda Deep, when they would mainly be flying east in the morning 

 and west in the evening. This leads me to think that we were close to their 

 breeding grounds, and that they were passing us on their way to and 

 from fishing grounds somewhere east of our position. We also saw here 

 some brown-winged terns (Sterna ancetheta), which strongly resembled 

 our conmon terns, both in size and in habits. 



A few frigate-birds (Fregatta ariel) and tropic-birds came into sight 



