SAN FRANCISCO — A giant tropical bird — a type rarely, if ever, seen in the Bay Area — got stuck in the vortex of a hurricane-force Pacific storm this month and took a dizzying Wizard of Oz-like ride hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles off course.
That’s the theory of how it ended up in a tree in Healdsburg, Calif.
The gangly, feathered galoot with a hooked beak and wingspan topping 7 feet is recovering at a Bay Area animal rescue center after a couple of bird watchers spotted it in the tree and knew right away that it was alien to Northern California.
It was positively identified Tuesday as a male juvenile magnificent frigatebird, known scientifically as Fregata magnificens. The species is known to inhabit the tropical Atlantic, the Caribbean and Cape Verde Islands. Although frigatebirds breed along the Pacific coast as far north as Mexico, they are most at home in steaming hot equatorial regions such as the Galapagos Islands.
“In our entire 37 years, we’ve never treated one in Northern California,” said Monte Merrick, a wildlife rehabilitator for the International Bird Rescue Research Center, in Cordelia, Calif. “There have been sightings, but those sightings are rare.”
The big bird was spotted Jan. 4 after a winter storm with wind over 75 mph swept through the Bay Area, knocking out power to thousands of residents.
The magnificent frigatebird, so named by sailors because of the way it sails majestically through the sky, is also known as a pirate bird because of its penchant for stealing food from other seabirds. Its tactic is to chase other seabirds, forcing them to regurgitate their meals, which the frigatebird catches, more often than not, in midair.
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