All species › Gannets and cormorants › Frigatebirds › Great Frigatebird
Great Frigatebird | Fregata minor
Grote fregatvogel | Fragata grande
The Great Frigatebird is a huge, black-looking seabird with a wingspan of over two metres, long crooked wings and a deeply forked tail that opens and closes like a pair of scissors in flight. It never settles on the water — its plumage is not waterproof — and lives on what it snatches from the surface in flight or robs from other seabirds. The male is all black with a scarlet throat pouch inflated like a balloon in display; the female is larger and has a white throat and breast.
Voice
Over the sea it is all but silent. At the colony things change: the displaying male drums his bill on the inflated pouch with a hollow rattling rrrr-rrrr, swinging his head and clattering his wings at females passing overhead. At the nest pairs greet each other with hoarse chattering and bill-clapping; young beg with a thin, persistent squeal.
No freely licensed recording has been found for this species yet; what to listen for is described below.
Identification
A large seabird of nearly a metre that looks black from below, with a wingspan of 205 to 230 centimetres and remarkably lightly built. The wings are long and sharply kinked at the wrist, and the deeply forked tail is usually held closed to a single point in gliding flight, so the fork shows only in a turn. The bill is long and strongly hooked at the tip. The male is all black with green gloss on the scapulars and a bright red pouch in the breeding season; the female is larger, with white chin, throat and breast, a grey-pink bill and a red orbital ring. Young birds have a rusty-white head and throat and a white belly, and take years to reach adult plumage.
Confusion species
Lesser Frigatebird (Fregata ariel) is the only other frigatebird occurring here regularly, and is smaller and more compact with a quicker wingbeat. The underside decides it. The male Lesser has white axillary patches running as two spurs from the flank into the underwing, which the all-black male Great lacks. The female Lesser has a black chin and throat with a white breast below that also runs out into those spurs, while on the female Great the chin, throat and breast are all white and the underwing stays plain dark. Immatures of the two are often not safely separable at sea, and the literature says so plainly.
Habitat
Warm open ocean over and beyond the continental shelf, where it often soars high on the trade winds. It nests in low trees and shrubs on uninhabited coral islets and sand cays, usually among boobies and terns, and roosts on the same islands on branches and bare ground. It never sits on the sea.
Where the bird is most often found, arranged by main group and formation.
Range and movements
Within the map window this is a bird of the tropical northern edge: the Coral Sea, the northern Great Barrier Reef and the Timor Sea. It breeds on the cays of the Coringa-Herald and Lihou reefs in the Coral Sea and on Ashmore Reef off the Kimberley, and is present year-round off north Queensland and the Kimberley coast. After cyclones it wanders south along the east coast into New South Wales. In New Zealand it is no more than a rare vagrant, chiefly off the northern North Island and at the Kermadec Islands.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
Where and when to look
Look high. Frigatebirds hang hundreds of metres above the coast on thermals and stand out as a black, angular shape with a forked tail among the gulls and terns. At a tern colony or behind a fishing boat they come low, and then the underside shows — always check it, because that is the only thing that separates this bird from Lesser Frigatebird. Around the reef cays of north Queensland the chance is best in an onshore wind.
Conservation
Least Concern (LC): the world range is vast and the total population large. Locally the picture is less comfortable. The colonies sit on small islands where rats, cats and land crabs take eggs and chicks, and where disturbance by visitors can put a whole colony into the air, after which gulls clean out the unguarded nests. Because the species breeds late in life, raises only one chick and does not breed every year, a lost season is slow to make good.
Scientific name
Fregata minor | (Gmelin, 1789)
Johann Friedrich Gmelin described the species in 1789 as Pelecanus minor, among the pelicans; because it has since been moved to another genus, author and year are in parentheses. The genus Fregata is named for the frigate, the fast and handy sailing ship, after the flight of these birds and their habit of robbing others. minor is Latin for 'smaller', which is confusing, as this is one of the largest frigatebirds; why Gmelin chose it is not recorded. There is no original type locality: later authors restricted it first to the eastern half of the Indian Ocean and finally to Christmas Island.