I recently heard of a tropical ocean bird who flew all the way up to Lake Tahoe, California, this past summer.

The lone Cocos booby was first spotted on August 1, fishing in the Tahoe Keys area of South Lake Tahoe. A photo of the bird, posted to the Tahoe Birding Facebook page, set birders near and far aflutter. Over the next eight days, many arrived at the lake to watch the bird fly over the waters, following fishing boats and performing cartwheeling dives to hunt for food.

Cocos boobies aren’t traditionally migratory. They historically inhabited Mexico’s Gulf of California and parts of southwestern Colombia. But over the past two decades, as our oceans have warmed, small breeding populations have moved to the Channel Islands, off the Southern California coast.

“The species is becoming less and less a strictly tropical entity; it’s range is expanding north at breakneck pace,” Will Richardson, executive director of the Tahoe Institute for Natural Science, informed me over the phone from Reno, Nevada. Still, the fact that this one had flown inland up and over the Sierra Nevada mountains was “rather insane,” he said. Most likely, it had lost its way.

Nine days after it was first spotted, the bird was found dead on a boat. “It’s a seabird. It was fishing quite avidly, but its internal chemistry couldn’t hack it with the clear water of Lake Tahoe,” Richardson said.

For Richardson, the booby’s last journey holds a note of hope. “It’s very sad that the bird found itself lost somewhere it couldn’t survive, but in a lot of ways, getting lost is important to the species’ survival,” he said. “Go make a wrong turn. That is how they are able to fairly quickly adapt to changing environmental conditions and push the boundaries of their range. That’s going to be very important in the next century.”

I’ve been mulling over Richardson’s words and how they speak to an apparent contradiction inherent in so many sentient species, including ours: the urge to stay rooted in place, in habits, versus the urge to wander, to explore new places and ways to be. While both urges are valid, it seems to me that, as the world changes around us, we have to be more open to pushing the boundaries of where we call home and who we call neighbors.

Photo of the Cocos booby in Tahoe by Sarah Mayhew

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