What's long and white and a sure sign of spring in Bermuda? If you guessed big white cruise ships with wobbly tourists who move at a slug's pace, you're wrong. The cruise ships won't start arriving for another week or two.

The White-tailed Tropicbirds (Phaethon lepturus), or locally known as the Longtail, return to Bermuda in the spring. It is a pelagic bird, which means it lives most of its life in the open ocean, returning to land just to breed. A single egg is laid and incubated by both adults with the chick hatching about 40 days later. The chick fledges about 12 weeks after hatching. After breeding season, many gather in the Sargasso Sea, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

* Thanks to Gino Crofton and his sailboat

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Photo © 2008 by George Lin