I had reasonable expectations that the last section of my planned route, from Salvador to Natal, in Brazil, would allow me to pick up a number of nice observations of beautiful birds. Unfortunately, the virus that blew up my cycling plans also caused me to spend most of the last three weeks indoors, usually in highly urbanized locations, and that also wiped out most of my recent birding opportunities. However, I still had one more chance to add a few more birds, since I had decided not to skip my planned trip to Fernando de Noronha, an oceanic island that hosts two endemic bird species.

Small-island endemic species can often be considered as sure-things, as far as bird observations are concerned, however, the way my luck had been going recently I would not have been surprised if I somehow managed to fail at this basic task as well. Fortunately, I needn’t have worried, since I picked up the first of these, Noronha Vireo, within minutes, in a bush right outside my hotel room.

The other endemic, Noronha Elaenia, was seen soon after, but it was not until later in the day that I was able to get a reasonable photograph.

With that task easily accomplished, I had all of my second day on the island available to see if I could turn up anything else. There were perhaps two or three marine-oriented birds, new to me, that were commonly seen near the shoreline, according to eBird, so I decided to try for those. I went to a place at the very northeastern tip of the island called Air France, which is so named because it is the nearest point of land to the place where a jumbo jet from that particular airline lost control and impacted the ocean several years earlier. There are a few rocky islets near the shoreline there, and it seemed to be a good place for the birds I was seeking.

My first target was a Booby. There were many Masked and Brown Boobies going about their business near the shore of the main island, but both of those species were already familiar to me. After a while, I began to focus my attention to some white birds that were hanging out in the bushes of one of the nearby islets, perhaps two hundred meters distant, and over fifty meters above the surface of the sea. This was just at the limit that the maximum zoom of my camera can resolve, and I took perhaps thirty images before I obtained one that fairly clearly showed a bird with a blue bill and red legs, Red-Footed Booby.

There were several White-Tailed Tropicbirds in the area as well, and I spent a long time desperately trying to convert one of them into a Red-Billed-, but to no avail. After I abandoned that effort, I decided that I would be best served by just sitting down and waiting to see if any interesting pelagic species would fly past. Now and then that happened, but most of the passers-by were Noddies, which I am also familiar with. Eventually, however, I was rewarded when Trindade Petrel, Dark Morph made a close approach. This photo is a little deceiving at first, as it sort of looks like a Brown Booby flying towards the camera. However the bird is definitely moving away from the camera, and subsequent views confirmed the identification. This bird was a pleasant surprise, of the type that I don’t often receive.

Barring any sort of crazy vagrant hanging around the urban areas adjacent to the Port of Natal, these birds will be the Final Four new birds of the neotropical section of the World2 Tour and, if future plans actually come to pass, they may be my final new birds from the entire Western Hemisphere as well. You may have noticed that these were not exactly the most spectacular species I have seen recently. I will soon be transferring to a part of the World where there are no bright blue Parrots, orange Cotingas, or green Hummingbirds, but where grays and browns will predominate. I think this may be nature’s way of telling me to be prepared, because the birds of the next section, while impressive in their own ways, will not provide the exquisitely extravagant palette that I have often enjoyed over the last four months.