LIFE HISTORIES OF NORTH AMERICAN TETRELS AND PELICANS. 197 

 SULA NEBOUXII Milnc-Edwardi. 

 BLVE-FOOTED BOOBV. 

 HABITS. 



This species is one of several tropical and semitropical forms 

 which have been included in our check list because they are to be 

 found in Lower California, but nowhere else within our limits. I 

 have never been able to understand why this region should be in- 

 cluded within the limits covered by our check list, for politically 

 and geographically it is a part of Mexico and faunally it is much 

 more closely allied to that country than to our own. Including this 

 remote and narrow strip of Mexico adds to our list a number of 

 otherwise foreign species and subspecies, which few American orni- 

 thologists are ever likely to see. 



Our information regarding the blue-footed booby comes from 

 those fortunate omitholo^sts who have visited the islands in the 

 Gulf of California and off the west coast of Mexico and the Gala- 

 pagos Islands. Our attention was first called to it by Col. N. S. 

 Goss (1888a) who found it breeding abundantly on San Pedro 

 Martir Isle in the Gulf of California. It was described and named 

 in his honor, as a new species, under the name Sula gossi, but it was 

 subsequently discovered that the species had been previously de- 

 scribed as Stila nebouxii. 



Courtship.— Mr. E. W. Gifford (1913) gives the following account 

 of the interesting courtship of this species : 



At Finger Point, Ohatliam Island, in the middle of February, there were 

 several blue-footed boobies standing about In the vicinity of some old nests 

 three or four hundred feet above the ocean. Whenever a bird alighted, there 

 was a great deal of squawking and bowing and waddling carried on by it and 

 its mate. In latter March during the mating-season at Tagus Cove, Albemarle 

 Island, they were quite demonstrative, the mated birds seeming to talk to each 

 other, and managing to keep up an incessant racket. One of them as a rule did 

 considerable strutting about, lifting its feet very high with each step, and ap- 

 pearing to us very ridiculous. They made a very elaborate bow uttering one 

 or two short notes at the same time. With the breast almost touching the 

 ground, the neck stretched upwards, and the wings outspread but held verti- 

 cally, the ceremony of bowing would last for about half a minute. 



Nesting. — In the same paper he refers to the nesting habits of the 

 blue- footed booby as follows: 



The nest of this species was like that of the Peruvian booby, a mere de- 

 pression in the earth in which two eggs were laid. On Hood and Champion 

 Islands blue-footed boobies nested in the vicinity of the shore, sometimes along 

 the tops of cliffs, at other times close to the water. The birds at Hood Island 

 in September, 1905, were nesting beside white glazed rocks and in the broiling 

 sun, with no shelter whatsoever. Many of them were sitting on their nests 

 with mouth open panting with heat and thirst. On Daphne, they nested on 

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