The Booby
A seabird named for its trusting lack of fear — with a ship on the horizon.
- Work
- The Booby (Pelecanus Sula), from The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands
- Artist / naturalist
- Mark Catesby
- Origin & date
- London, 1731–1743
- Held by
- Wikimedia Commons (National Gallery of Art)
Format
The full-resolution scan, color-managed to the source — yours to print, study, and keep.
Size
$19.00
The story
The booby earned its unflattering English name from sailors who found the bird absurdly easy to catch by hand, showing little of the wariness other seabirds had learned around humans — a trait that made it a reliable emergency food source on long ocean voyages and, eventually, a byword for foolishness. Catesby shows the bird perched on a rocky outcrop with a distant ship under sail, a rare instance in his Natural History of an explicit human presence sharing the frame, alongside a separate anatomical study of the booby's distinctive hooked beak and skull structure at upper left. What to notice: the bird's oversized, fully webbed feet, splayed flat across the rock in the lower study, tell the real story — a seabird built for diving and swimming, distinctly out of its element on solid ground, which is exactly why sailors found it so easy to walk right up to.
About this reproduction
- Faithful reproduction of a public-domain work, sourced from Wikimedia Commons (National Gallery of Art)’s open-access release.
- Printed to order on 200gsm EMA matte art paper: smooth, no glare.
- Color-managed to the source scan.
- Ships in 5–8 business days; satisfaction guarantee.
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The White-Headed Eagle
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