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Today Brooklyn Bird Watch features a Heather Wolf photo of the Common Tern, as seen in Brooklyn Bridge Park.
Common Terns are graceful fliers with long angular wings. They are slender birds with forked tails that in photographs appear to resemble a swallow’s tail. They are primarily grey and white with a black cap and orange-red beak with a black tip Their legs and feet are the same orange-red color as the beak. Overall, the Common Tern has a very distinctive, elegant appearance, even if they do have short legs. Terns are predominantly thought of as a subgroup in the family Laridae, which includes gulls and skimmers. They eat on the fly, feeding on small fish up to 3-4 inches in length. Occasionally, they eat shrimp or aquatic insects.
The New York State Wild Life Conservation Agency tells us; “The Common Tern is the most widespread and abundant tern in New York. In the early 1900s, Common Terns were almost extirpated (eliminated) by plume hunters on the Atlantic Coast. Not only did the fashion industry use the feathers, but sometimes hats were adorned with a stuffed version of the bird itself. After passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in 1918, this species made a comeback in the 1920s and 30s.
“Today, competition with ring-billed gulls for nest sites in upstate New York and disturbance on Long Island breeding beaches are the reasons for decline. Many colonies are being forced to breed in salt marsh habitats as a result of the increased human use of beaches and competition with herring and great black-backed gulls. Flooding and predation are problems as well.”
According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Common Tern is also the most widespread tern in North America, and like a lot of sea birds, the Common Terns are very social. They forage in groups and nest on the ground in colonies (on Long Island, for example) made up of several different kinds of terns, and these crowded, picturesque colonies can sometimes reach into the thousands, and as one may imagine, become very noisy.
Their nests, usually lined with vegetation, are simple scrapes built above the high tide line in sand, gravel, shells, or windrowed seaweed. If there is a threat of high water, the Common Tern will add whatever it can find, vegetation, bones, or shell fragments to raise the nest.
They usually lay a clutch of 3 eggs on average during late May through July. Both sexes share incubation duties for sometimes up to 27 days. The young fledge about 28 days after hatching. By mid-October, the terns head for their wintering grounds. The wintering grounds are from its southernmost breeding areas on the Atlantic Coast to northern Ecuador and Brazil. In New York, common terns nest primarily on Long Island, but they are also known to breed on small natural and artificial islands (power cribs, piers, navigation sites, etc.) in Lake Erie, Lake Ontario, the St. Lawrence and Niagara Rivers, and Oneida Lake in central New York.
Between January and August 2023, there were 941 Common Tern sightings reported in Brooklyn Bridge Park.
