As I mentioned a couple of days ago, we've been visited by hundreds of red-footed boobies over the course of our trip. They routinely swing by close, and a few even try to land. Usually they are defeated by the turbulent air near Aquila. Once, one hung onto the triatic stay (near the top of our mizzen) for a few seconds. But we have a new friend who has us figured out. Sula arrived just after dark yesterday, and it took him more than a dozen tries to get a perch on the stern-rail about 10 feet behind the cockpit. He spent the night and is still with us this morning. He seems to have settled in very well, relaxing and doing a lot of feather maintenance. This morning he's gone out on a couple of fishing trips, which are great fun to watch. He hangs in the air, usually just ahead of the bow, waiting for us to scare up a flying fish, of which there are a lot about. Once one is in sight, Sula swoops down and tries to grab it either from the air, or else in the water with a shallow dive. On what was presumably a successful dive on his second trip, he was underwater for many seconds, and the fish were flying out of the water to escape. We're happy to help his foraging!

There are both scientific and philosophical questions posed by Sula's behavior. We're fortunate to have David Dickman on board, a polymath who studies, among other things, bird orientation to magnetic fields. We got to talking about whether Sula would know that he was going north at (for him) a snail's pace. We didn't have a good answer, but guessed it would be yes. So little is known, even now, about bird navigation. This question leads to the philosophical one. It turns out we are already north of the normal range of these birds and aiming to go farther north. Are we really doing this fellow a kindness, or are we leading him astray? It depends a lot on whether he knows where he is once he decides to head out again. We're tempted to trust him on this, though - these are long-distance wanderers and probably have a pretty big map and a good compass in their heads. In the meantime, we're saving him a whole lot of fuel. If he decides to stay with us the whole way, we'll have to call the rare-bird hotline on our way in. But I am guessing that when the flying fish thin out, he'll be on his way. Hopefully back south.