New seabird sighted in Bangladesh

A Red-footed Booby has been spotted for the first time in Bangladesh. Red-footed Booby is a pelagic bird, meaning it lives in the open ocean.

A local resident of Teknaf spotted the lone bird on the beach near Shyamlapur on July 18.

"I thought it was a duck. As I went near the bird, I realised it was not. I picked it from the water as it looked very exhausted, and put it on dry sand," said Jalal Uddin, an INGO staff who located the bird. Jalal did not notice any injury on the bird.

Bangladesh Bird Club members with the help of other pelagic bird specialists from abroad later identified the bird from the photo as an immature Red-footed Booby.

The bird has already been included in the checklist of Birds of Bangladesh as number 711.

Jalal Uddin had left the bird on the beach unharmed.

A day later, as the Bird Club members requested him to go back to the area and check if the bird was still there, Jalal could not find it.

Tareq Onu, a member and a former vice-president of Bangladesh Bird Club, said, "We are very happy to have included Red-footed Booby as a bird of Bangladesh based on this record. We hope the bird made a safe return to the sea."

Like other pelagic birds, Red-footed Booby spends a significant portion of its life in the open seas in the tropics, and rarely ventures close to land except during breeding time.

Earlier, another species of Booby bird- Masked Booby- was spotted once in Bangladesh at the Swatch of No-Ground area in the Bay of Bengal. Three species of Booby birds have ever been recorded in the Bay of Bengal, and 10 species in the whole world.

Red-footed Booby is categorised as a least-concern species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).