Two foreign ornithologists, Gary Allport and Jan-Erik Nilsson, found a seabird never before recorded in Bangladesh at Sonadia, Cox's Bazar, on 7 September 2024, a rare vagrant now added to the country's bird list. It has no Bengali name; translating its English name, it can be called the small noddy.

Writing in Prothom Alo, A N M Aminur Rahman, a bird and wildlife breeding and veterinary specialist at Gazipur Agricultural University, describes searching for it on 26 September that year. After failing to find it in the Moheshkhali channel, the team went to Belekerdia char on Sonadia, where Professor Monirul Khan spotted the dark bird through binoculars; they photographed and filmed three birds for an hour and a half.

Fishers were working nearby and the birds stayed close to them in hope of fish. Being birds of the open ocean with little experience of people, they may simply have been less afraid, he writes.

The bird, Anous tenuirostris of the family Laridae, is 30-34 cm long and weighs 97-120 g, with a dark brown body, whitish-grey forehead and crown and a long, very thin black bill. It lives on Indian Ocean coasts, coral reefs and open sea, flying with fish shoals and picking small fish and squid from the surface.

It breeds on predator-free islands such as the Seychelles, Chagos, Maldives and Mauritius, in colonies of up to 10,000 pairs, laying a single egg that both parents incubate for 34-35 days; chicks fly at 55-70 days and birds live about 17 years.

Photo: A N M Aminur Rahman

Source: Prothom Alo