Darwin's Playground

The wildlife on Christmas Island and in its waters is simply amazing. We were fortunate enough to see a lot of birds on the island. Ken took this great shot of a Frigate bird one day.

[Ken] The boat dropped me off on some random flat to catch some bones. When I turned around, the boat was gone. It had disappeared to drop Angelo off somewhere. In the distance, I saw a small dot in the sky. The dot was coming towards me and it didn't stop unitl it literally was about 8 inches from my head. The birds on Christmas really like checking things out.



I got a shot of this awesome-looking Boobie, which an avid birder at work told me was a Masked Boobie. He thought this is one of the best shots ever taken of a Boobie. I think it captures this bird's personality perfectly.


Not all encounters with these birds went so well. The Boobies apparently like the flies and lures as much as the fish do, and they would often sweep down and pluck your lure or fly from the ocean. At one point Ken almost had a double header of Brown Boobies. One got hooked on a lure he was trolling and its mate came down to help it and got itself caught briefly, but managed to get free. Ken had to reel the Boobie in and Michael was able to remove the hook from it and release it.

Below is the video of Ken hooking up with the Brown Boobie. This was also accidentally shot on the lowest resolution, but you can still see what's going on. Also, you can actually hear a little of the native Gilbertese that Russ and Michael as speaking in this video.

[Ken] What was interesting about catching this bird was that I caught it while trolling a Rapala CD14. These things get down fairly deep. Well, not deep enough. From high up, the bird took many a dive at my lure and eventually grabbed it.



The dolphins were cool - I never got tired of seeing them. They're just all over the place zig-zagging, jumping and spinning, belly-flopping, etc..








The following video is a short clip of the Spinner Dolphins having some fun around the outrigger early one morning when we were heading outside of the lagoon.