The Birds of Saint Brandon
I have flown drones along coastlines, over reefs, around boats. None of it prepared me for Saint Brandon. On the first afternoon at L’île du Sud — the southern lagoon island where the bird density is, by Saint Brandon’s standards, relatively modest — I lifted the drone for the first time and discovered within seconds that the air was not empty. Fairy terns drifted past the camera at eye level. Sooty terns climbed past me in shallow spirals. A lesser noddy banked across the frame and continued without altering its course. I brought the drone down within minutes, watched the birds, and tried again from a different vantage. The same thing happened. There was no air at Saint Brandon that did not already belong to something else. Even on South Island — where the colonies are smaller than on the northern Guano Islands and where the density of nesting birds is a fraction of what builds up at Albatross or Puits à Eau in the cool season — I found myself constantly recalculating the airspace.
The birds were not afraid of the drone. They simply moved through it as they moved through everything else, as though it were one more piece of weather to share. That experience, more than any single fact about the place, told me what Saint Brandon is. It is, before it is anything else, a bird sanctuary in the original sense of the word — a place where seabirds have, for as long as anyone has been counting, gathered to breed in numbers the rest of the world has stopped producing.
The 1975 Newlands survey estimated the breeding population of sooty terns alone at over 80,000 birds. The 2010 surveys revised that figure upward to perhaps a million during peak nesting. The 1968 Staub and Gueho mission counted 2,000 frigatebirds across the archipelago. Roseate terns, masked boobies, red-footed boobies, lesser and common noddies, fairy terns, wedge-tailed shearwaters — at least eight species breed at Saint Brandon, with twenty-six species of seabird recorded in total. Albatross Island, on its own, supports a sooty tern colony estimated at fifty thousand individuals, with fairy terns, lesser noddies, and turnstones layered into the same five hectares of low scrub and herb mat.
The northern Guano Islands — Albatross, Puits à Eau, Poulailler, Fregate, Pearl, Sirène — are the heart of the bird population. Puits à Eau alone is estimated at thirty thousand sooty terns. Poulailler at ten thousand. Albatross at fifty thousand plus, with thousands more of the smaller species nesting in the same shrub canopy.
The fishermen at L’île du Sud told me — and the few accounts in the literature agree — that on certain evenings in the height of the breeding cycle on Albatross, the sky over the island darkens. The birds rise from the herb mat all at once, and the lower air becomes a single moving thing. I did not see this. We did not reach Albatross. But I have stood under colonies that were, in their smaller way, doing the same thing — at Coco, at Avocaré, at Raphael in the evenings when the frigatebirds rode the updrafts off the western reef wall. There is no land equivalent for this density of life.
The closest thing I have ever seen was a swarm of locusts as a child in Johannesburg. The birds at Saint Brandon are different in every way that matters — they do not consume, they restore, they have evolved within this exact geography over thousands of years — but the quantity of them, the impossibility of conceiving of a sky with so many living things in it, is the same.
Okay, so, I am not a birder. I do not own a pair of binoculars. I cannot reliably tell a lesser frigatebird from a greater frigatebird at distance, and I had to look up the species name of the wedge-tailed shearwater more than once. But I learned, in nineteen days, what a bird sanctuary actually is — which is not a place birds visit, but a place birds belong, and where the human presence is the visitor, and where the only honest posture is to look up.
Sooty tern — Onychoprion fuscatus
The dominant seabird of Saint Brandon. Mauritian Creole Ye-ye. The 1975 Newlands survey estimated the breeding population at over 80,000 birds, concentrated on Albatross, Puits à Eau, and Poulailler in the cool season. A 2010 survey raised that figure substantially — perhaps over a million birds across the archipelago during peak nesting. One of the most pelagic seabirds in the world, known to stay continuously airborne for years at a time after fledging, sleeping on the wing, before returning to land only to breed.
Fairy tern (white tern) — Gygis alba
The most ethereal of Saint Brandon’s seabirds — pure white, with translucent wings, dark eyes ringed in black, a single black bill. They do not build nests. The female lays a single egg directly on the bare branch of a tree, balancing it in a small depression in the bark. The chick, when it hatches, has strong claws to grip the branch from day one. We saw fairy terns on every vegetated island we visited.
Lesser noddy — Anous tenuirostris
Nests primarily in the Arguisia–Scaevola shrub, building loose stick-and-leaf nests on the windward sides of the islands. Breeding colonies estimated at thousands of pairs on the larger Guano Islands. The species name tenuirostris — slender-billed — distinguishes them from the common noddy.
Common noddy — Anous stolidus
The larger, ground-nesting cousin of the lesser noddy. Found in small groups on many of the islets, often those unused by other birds.
Greater frigatebird — Fregata minor
The frigatebird is unmistakable — black, angular, with a forked tail, seven-foot wingspan, and the male’s scarlet inflatable throat-pouch displayed during breeding. Frigatebirds do not land on water — their feathers are not waterproof. They feed by piracy, harassing other seabirds into dropping their catch. Saint Brandon supports breeding populations of both F. minor (greater) and F. ariel (lesser) frigatebirds, concentrated on Île Paul and Fregate Island.
Lesser frigatebird — Fregata ariel
The smaller of the two frigatebird species. Similar behaviour, slightly smaller wingspan. Identification between the two species is best made on the basis of the white belly markings on the female.
Masked booby — Sula dactylatra
The largest booby of the archipelago — white-bodied with a black trailing edge to the wings, a black mask, and a yellow bill. Nests in low numbers on Albatross and other northern islands. The 1975 survey estimated 5,000 birds; more recent counts suggest some decline.
Red-footed booby — Sula sula
A smaller booby with the unmistakable bright red feet. A single specimen was found on Saint Brandon during the 1997 survey — the species was thought to be in serious decline at the archipelago. The conservation priority is high.
Wedge-tailed shearwater — Ardenna pacifica (formerly Puffinus pacificus)
A burrow-nesting seabird, brown above, white below, with a distinctive wedge-shaped tail and long narrow wings. Once nested in large numbers at Saint Brandon, but the 1975 survey expressed serious concern about decline due to introduced predators. May have been lost from the archipelago entirely, though recent surveys have not confirmed this.
Roseate tern — Sterna dougallii
A small, elegant tern — palest pink-flushed body, long forked tail. Nests in small numbers on sand and shingle banks in October and November. Vulnerable to disturbance because of low numbers and exposed nest sites.
Curlew — Numenius arquata
A migratory wading bird, recorded passing through Saint Brandon during the cooler months. Long down-curved bill. Calls like a sad reed.
Turnstone — Arenaria interpres
A small migratory wader that overwinters at Saint Brandon, having travelled from the Arctic to feed on the intertidal flats. Constantly active. Flips small stones and shells with its bill to find food beneath.
Editorial & Commissioned Work
If you would like to be in touch — for editorial commissions, place writing, long-form journalism, or design and brand work — write to me at river@welovethesea.co
I am available to be sent to places. I take a small number of commissions a year, for editors, publications, and brands who want a particular kind of attention paid to a particular place. Travel writing in the conventional sense is not what I do. My work is written from inside a place rather than across the surface of it, paired with original research and field notes from the ground.
A note on this site
The pages here are observational, not authoritative. Where I have drawn on the scientific record and research, I have cited it. Where I have written from my own watching, I have said so. For the formal conservation work being done at Saint Brandon — and there is good work being done — please visit the Saint Brandon Conservation Trust.
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