After referring to a few sources, notably the article "Identification of Christmas Island, Great and Lesser Frigatebirds" by David James in Birding Asia No. 1 (June 2004), I can't see why this isn't a juvenile Lesser Frigatebird.
It very closely resembles his Plate 30 bird, labelled juvenile Lesser, having, to quote his caption to that photo, "prominent axillary spurs originating from the front corners of an almost triangular white belly-patch (the belly patch appears more triangular when viewed from directly below)" [as indeed it does in the first distant shot from below].
Having said that his Plate 22, showing juvenile Christmas Island does not look massively different - except perhaps for the breadth and solidity of the breast-band - nor do some of the photos of Christmas Island juvenile in the Chalmers paper. There again the picture of a bird identified as a Lesser Frigatebird, that I saw at Mai Po on 17 March 2001, photographed by John Holmes and also shown in the Chalmers paper, looks similar too.
With no real way of judging size, are they, I wonder, separable with any kind of certainty, even with good photos like this, and isn't it interesting how the clearly present spurs on this recent Po Toi bird "disappeared" on the more distant shot?
Mike Turnbull
[ Last edited by tmichael at 23/04/2009 19:02 ]
