An exotic visitor landed in Kansas City recently, drawing hundreds to a midtown pond for a chance to see a literal odd bird out of place.
The pond at the Kauffman Foundation, half a mile east of the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, is usually pretty quiet, but it was busy all weekend with people trying to snap a good picture of the brown booby, a tropical bird that from a distance could be a big duck.
“Birders are crazy people,” said Anne Kruse, momentarily looking away from her long-lensed camera pointed at the bird about 30 yards away. “An hour after I found out about it, I was on my way. This is something that isn’t normal for us to see, and it’s in our backyard so it’s pretty amazing really.”
Brown boobies are seabirds that normally live in the Caribbean tropics, more than 1,000 miles away. It’s rare to see them even in Florida, so a Missouri appearance is extraordinary.
“I think he’s followed his FIFA team here,” one photographer noted on a Facebook group for Missouri birders.
Brown boobies are a more common sight in Curaçao, an island off the coast of Venezuela that is playing its second-ever World Cup match this weekend in Kansas City.
“It was blown off course. It’s like a couple of years ago, there was a flamingo in Kansas,” said Kruse, referring to a 2023 sighting at the Chase State Fishing Lake and Wildlife Area.
A map from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology shows that this is only the fourth recorded sighting of a brown booby in Missouri since 2021.
The bird is — you guessed it — mostly brown, with lighter coloring under the wings and across the belly, and a white beak with a little blue around the eyes. And it’s not just fanatics who came out for a look.
“I mean, I appreciate them, I love to feed them, I love to watch them, but I’m not really a birder,” said Carol Branson. Branson found out about the spectacle, like almost everyone here, through social media and word of mouth.
“People were talking about it. My girlfriend… she’s the one that told me about it, she’s like ‘You gotta go see this! It’s a party!’”
The bird was still sitting, swooping and diving in and around the Kauffman Center pond on Monday.
It’s not clear how late the brown booby party will go on — or if it’ll stick around for the Curaçao match this weekend (7 p.m. Saturday, June 20 at Kansas City Stadium).
Kruse says the brown booby is probably just resting up before flying off to surprise and delight birders somewhere else.
