Mystery Bird

[David Adams <>]

I tend to look at mystery bird pictures before the descriptions. My immediate response to these photos was "noddy". I haven't been to Norfolk, but as it's a deep-water, oceanic islands...it seems like a good spot for noddy. A quick search for "Norfolk Island" noddy turns of lots of reference to White-capped Noddy. That seems plausible (assuming that the bill in picture #2 is shortened as an artifact of the photographic angle.) I don't know this species of of Noddy (I lived elsewhere in the deep Pacific), but the ones I do know like to nest on cliffs. Often in bits that have an overhang - not sure what the area you were looking at looked like.

If it is a Noddy, and depending on region, they can be hard to distinguish. (Black and Brown Noddy are pretty much indistinguishable in the Pacific around Hawaii, for example, but are more distinctively marked further south in the Pacific.) Not sure about the waters around Norfolk.

I could also be completely wrong here and perhaps someone that knows the area properly will chime in with a better answer.