{"id":706661,"date":"2026-06-16T03:08:15","date_gmt":"2026-06-16T03:08:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/706661\/"},"modified":"2026-06-16T03:08:15","modified_gmt":"2026-06-16T03:08:15","slug":"caribbean-seabird-spotted-in-kansas-city-amid-world-cup-frenzy-kcur","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/706661\/","title":{"rendered":"Caribbean seabird spotted in Kansas City amid World Cup frenzy | KCUR"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

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>, a tropical bird that from a distance could be a big duck.<\/p>\n

\u201cBirders are crazy people,\u201d said Anne Kruse, momentarily looking away from her long-lensed camera pointed at the bird about 30 yards away. \u201cAn hour after I found out about it, I was on my way. This is something that isn\u2019t normal for us to see, and it\u2019s in our backyard so it\u2019s pretty amazing really.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brown boobies are seabirds that normally live in the Caribbean tropics, more than 1,000 miles away. It\u2019s rare to see them even in Florida, so a Missouri appearance is extraordinary.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think he\u2019s followed his FIFA team here,\u201d one photographer noted on a Facebook<\/a> group for Missouri birders.<\/p>\n

Brown boobies are a more common sight in Cura\u00e7ao, an island off the coast of Venezuela that is playing its second-ever World Cup match this weekend in Kansas City.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was blown off course. It\u2019s like a couple of years ago, there was a flamingo in Kansas,\u201d said Kruse, referring to a 2023 sighting at the Chase State Fishing Lake and Wildlife Area<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Carlos Moreno<\/p>\n

\/<\/p>\n

KCUR 89.3<\/p>\n

Photographers line up to capture the brown booby at the Kauffman Foundation pond in Kansas City, Missouri, on June 15, 2026.<\/p>\n

A map from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology<\/a> shows that this is only the fourth recorded sighting of a brown booby in Missouri since 2021.<\/p>\n

The bird is \u2014 you guessed it \u2014 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\u2019s not just fanatics who came out for a look.<\/p>\n

\u201cI mean, I appreciate them, I love to feed them, I love to watch them, but I\u2019m not really a birder,\u201d said Carol Branson. Branson found out about the spectacle, like almost everyone here, through social media and word of mouth.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople were talking about it. My girlfriend\u2026 she\u2019s the one that told me about it, she\u2019s like \u2018You gotta go see this! It\u2019s a party!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The bird was still sitting, swooping and diving in and around the Kauffman Center pond on Monday.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not clear how late the brown booby party will go on \u2014 or if it\u2019ll stick around for the Cura\u00e7ao match this weekend (7 p.m. Saturday, June 20 at Kansas City Stadium).<\/p>\n

Kruse says the brown booby is probably just resting up before flying off to surprise and delight birders somewhere else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An exotic visitor landed in Kansas City recently, drawing hundreds to a midtown pond for a chance to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":706662,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[305115,305116,79,201],"class_list":["post-706661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-brown-booby-kansas-city","tag-curacao-kansas-city","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=706661"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706661\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/706662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=706661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=706661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=706661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}