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Red-tailed Tropicbirds are medium-sized seabirds with long streamers. Their plumage is almost all white, including the streamers. They have black eye stripes, a black "V" on the upperwings, from the scapulars to the alulas, and partly black primaries. The upper base of the long streamers is also partly black. Only golden-morphology birds (not shown here) have a golden sheen on their underparts. The bill is yellow (orange in golden-morphology specimens), the eyes, legs and feet are black.

The overall distribution of this species can be assessed, and specific locations where birds have been spotted can be found, based on individual sighting reports submitted by birdwatchers to ebird.org .

The global distribution of White-tailed Tropicbird is available HERE .

There are various races of White-tailed Tropicbirds that, taken all together, populate most of the tropical oceans.

In Australian territorial waters and off-shore islands in the Indian Ocean only nominate race lepturus is found. Race "dorotheae" is found in the tropical Pacific Ocean, but they can disperse along the Australian East coast from Cape York peninsula, QLD, in the North, all the way down the coast, occasionally to Melbourne, VIC, and Flinders Island, TAS, in the Bass Strait. They are found along the Great Barrier Reef, in NSW coastal waters and even, on rare occasions, in parts of inland NSW (inside the Great Dividing Range and parts of the Murray-Darling Basin).

White-tailed Tropicbirds breed on tropical islands and otherwise mostly stay out on the open oceans, where they disperse. Occasionally they are found in coastal waters and only very rarely above the Australian continent.

Race "lepturus"

We have not seen White-tailed Tropicbirds in Australia yet. D. Wilczynska reports spotting White-tailed Tropicbirds on the Maldives in October 2015. All sighting and photographic information presented on this page has kindly been contributed by D. Wilczynska.