Lame Byrds pun aside . . .
Tern Nation in Alameda
Their gravelly call precedes them, these terns with their fuzzy black berets and orange feet. They sound like aerial barflys with too much whiskey and smoke on the voice box. When it’s a row of more than 50 terns — alternately calling to each other and to the gulls that regularly interrupt their conga line — it’s some music to behold.
When perusing a field guide, there’s great similarity between tern species. As a relatively new tern observer, I believe these to be Forster’s. Elegant Terns are also found around the Bay Area. Here’s a USGS list of field markings for Forster’s Terns.
Terns & Gulls – ©ingrid
Note the variations in colors. The black patch over the eye signifies an adult bird with non-breeding plumage, contrasted with the full black cap which constitutes breeding plumage. (Breeding feathers are changes, usually dramatic color shifts, which occur in bird plumage during their breeding seasons.)
Forster\’s Terns – ©ingrid
There was a blissful wisp — just a wisp — of wind as we started our walk. Two hours later, with patchwork sunburns where the zinc oxide didn’t hit, we’d grabbed shots of chattering terns, flying terns, fishing terns, and out-of-focus terns. These little guys are small and fast, and dive with the velocity of a torpedo.
Forster\’s Tern Pulling Out of a Dive
It’s possible to mistake terns for gulls (albeit extremely small gulls) if you don’t know terns (or gulls). Once you recognize the terns’ unique wing structure and coloration (with variations across tern species, of course) you’ll notice the choppy flying patterns as contrasted with the somewhat steady and languid wing strokes of a gull.
Forster\’s Tern in Flight – ©ingrid
Forster’s Terns hover and flutter before plunging head first for marine eats just below the surface. And their flying style tends to be choppy, prone to sudden turns and changes of course — exacerbating the difficulty in photographing them well.
Forster’s Tern in Flight – ©ingrid
We were in awe, watching them maneuver this way in extremely shallow water — in dives that should have been concussive, but which ended with a bare grazing of the water’s surface, a bill full of food, and a graceful recovery — with wingtips fluttering through their reflections.
Forster\’s Tern in Flight – ©ingrid
More about Forster’s Terns: All About Birds (Cornell Lab of Ornithology)
[…] Posts on Terns: There is a Season … Terns | More Alameda Terns | Anthropomorphizing a Caspian-Peregrine Tussle | The Turns of Terns […]
[…] Take a look at this image of terns — not because it’s anything spectacular. In fact, those terns were but specks on my visual horizon, so this is a dramatic crop to show just one thing: the size differential between the Caspian Terns and the Forster’s Terns I wrote about in a previous post. […]