Good morning, Aimee and I are waking up so tired after a super fun night out at a fabulous new restaurant celebrating 25 years that the Curacao Sea Aquarium has been open, it was one of the best employee parties I have ever been to! We went to a new place called La Ldea “The Rainforest Mystery”, from the outside it looks like a Mayan temple or something discovered in the Yucatan and the inside was unreal plus some of the best food we have had in Curacao!

This is for my bird lovers out there this morning and we have quite a few! This is a giant Frigate bird, one of many that soar all day long above the aquarium and try to grab a free snack from the trainers as they feed the dolphins. If a dolphin misses the thrown fish or for some reason isn’t hungry these Frigates whip down in seconds and pick them up, there is nothing wasted with them around. Frigatebirds are large, with iridescent black feathers (the females have a white underbelly), with long wings (male wingspan can reach 2.3 meters) and deeply-forked tails. The males have inflatable red-colored throat pouches called “gular pouches”, which they inflate to attract females during the mating season. Frigatebirds are found over tropical oceans and ride warm updrafts. Therefore, they can often be spotted riding weather fronts and can signal changing weather patterns. These birds do not swim and cannot walk well, and cannot take off from a flat surface. Having the largest wingspan to body weight ratio of any bird, they are essentially aerial, able to stay aloft for more than a week, landing only to roost or breed on trees or cliffs. As members of Pelecaniformes, frigatebirds have the key characteristics of all four toes being connected by the web, a gular sac (also called gular skin), and a furcula that is fused to the breastbone. Although there is definitely a web on the frigatebird foot, the webbing is reduced and part of each toe is free. Frigatebirds produce very little oil and therefore do not land in the ocean. The gular sac is used as part of a courtship display and is, perhaps, the most striking frigatebird feature.