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Manu Minute: The Boobies of Hawai‘i

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A red-footed booby and a brown booby at the Hawai‘i Wildlife Center.
Ann Tanimoto-Johnson/Hawai‘i Wildlife Center
A red-footed booby and a brown booby at the Hawai‘i Wildlife Center.

Boobies are a group of goose-size tropical seabirds with long pointed bills, wings, and tails. There are three species of boobies that nest in Hawai‘i—the red-footed, brown, and masked. All are known by their Hawaiian name of ΄ā, the shortest name for any bird in the world.

You can usually find red-footed boobies out at sea, except during breeding season when they come to land. Unlike many other birds, boobies often incubate their eggs by sitting on them with their big webbed feet!

Manu Minute, Red-footed and Brown Booby Spectrogram video.mp4

Patrick Hart is the host of HPR's Manu Minute. He runs the Listening Observatory for Hawaiian Ecosystems (LOHE) Lab at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo.
Savannah Harriman-Pote is the energy and climate change reporter. She is also the lead producer of HPR's "This Is Our Hawaiʻi" podcast. Contact her at sharrimanpote@hawaiipublicradio.org.
Ann Tanimoto-Johnson is the Lab Manager & Research Technician in the Hart Lab/Listening Observatory for Hawaiian Ecosystems (LOHE) Bioacoustics Lab. She researches the ecology, bioacoustics, and conservation of our native Hawaiian forests, birds, and bats.
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