All species › Gannets and cormorants › Boobies and gannets › Red-footed Booby
Red-footed Booby | Sula sula
Roodpootgent | Boba patirroja
The Red-footed Booby is the smallest and slenderest booby of the region, and the only one nesting in trees and shrubs rather than on bare ground. It comes in several colour morphs — from almost wholly white to evenly brown — but all of them share bright red webbed feet and a pale blue bill with a pink base. It hunts far offshore, up to a hundred and fifty kilometres out, flying more lightly and nimbly than the other boobies.
Voice
At sea it is all but mute; it is heard only at the breeding colony. The male greets his mate with a thin high whistle, the female answers with a hoarse snoring croak that carries well into the colony. Round the nest comes a soft rhythmic grunting as the pair fuss over each other's head and bill, and a hard rasping scream at an intruder. Chicks beg with continuous piping that stops only once a parent has coughed up food.
No freely licensed recording has been found for this species yet; what to listen for is described below.
Identification
A slight booby of about seventy to eighty centimetres with a wingspan around a metre and a half — noticeably smaller and lighter than the other boobies, with a longer tail and a faster, more flexible flight. Decisive and the same in every morph: bright red legs and webs, a pale blue bill with a pink base and pink bare facial skin. The white morph is white with black flight feathers, often with a golden wash over the head, and has a white tail; the brown morph is evenly mid-brown without any dividing line; between them sits a morph that is brown with a white rump and tail. Young birds are dull brown with darker wings and pale pink legs that only turn red in the second year.
Confusion species
The brown morph closely resembles Brown Booby (Sula leucogaster), but that bird has a dead-straight line between brown breast and white belly and never red feet; Red-footed is evenly brown from head to belly. The white morph resembles Masked Booby (Sula dactylatra), but that is larger, with a yellow bill, a black bare face mask, a black tail and black along the whole trailing edge, while Red-footed keeps a white tail and has only the flight feathers black. Young Australasian Gannets (Morus serrator) are far larger and heavier and show no trace of red on the legs.
Habitat
Deep, warm ocean water well beyond the continental shelf, where it hunts flying fish and squid, including at dusk. Unlike the other boobies it nests not on the ground but in low trees and shrubs on coral cays and reef islets — pisonia, mangrove, sea grape — where it builds an untidy stick nest.
Where the bird is most often found, arranged by main group and formation.
Range and movements
Within the map window it breeds on the cays of the Coringa-Herald and Lihou reefs in the Coral Sea and on Ashmore Reef in the Timor Sea; further south along the Great Barrier Reef it is no more than an irregular visitor. In New Zealand it is a vagrant only, with records at the Kermadec Islands (2016 and 2021), at the Muriwai gannet colony (2017), at Pakatoa Island in the Hauraki Gulf (2017) and off north Taranaki (2019); the nearest colony is in Tonga, some 780 kilometres from the Kermadecs.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
Where and when to look
Anyone who really wants this bird must go to the Coral Sea or the Timor Sea reefs, because the chance from the Australian mainland is slim. On a reef trip, look for the birds sitting on the bushes of a cay rather than on the ground — that alone points to this species. At sea, watch the legs, which it trails back in the dive, and the light, almost tern-like flight.
Conservation
Least Concern (LC) thanks to a range across all the tropical oceans, although BirdLife reports the world population declining. Because it nests in bushes it is less exposed to rats than the ground-nesting boobies, but cats, goats that strip out the shrub layer and clearance of cay vegetation are real threats. Disturbance by visitors, entanglement in fishing gear and the tidying of reef islets for tourism weigh on top of that, and since a pair raises only one chick a season, colonies recover slowly.
Scientific name
Sula sula | (Linnaeus, 1766)
Linnaeus described the species in 1766 as Pelecanus Sula, among the pelicans; because it has since been moved to another genus, author and year are in parentheses. The genus Sula had been introduced by Brisson as early as 1760, with a name going back to the North Germanic word for gannet, as in Faroese sula. The specific epithet sula therefore repeats the same name. The type locality, first given vaguely as 'in Pelago indico', was restricted in 1933 by Grant and Mackworth-Praed to Barbados in the West Indies — a considerable shift, since Linnaeus's material plainly came from the Atlantic.