T is for tern

25 Thursday Dec 2025

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Arctic tern, birding, birdwatching, British birds, British terns, Common tern, Little tern, Sandwich tern, terns

Terns are such skilled fliers that they are always a real delight to watch in motion and, during 2025, I’ve had the absolute pleasure of spending time watching four different species, mostly because of my three summer visits to Weymouth but we’ve also had a couple of tern visitors in Cardiff Bay as well.

First up were Common terns (Sterna hirundo) (above), seen in large numbers during my first visit of the year to Weymouth, which was particularly special as these birds breed at Lodmoor Nature Reserve (Breeding Common terns, 17 June). I saw the Common terns during subsequent visits too, and we were treated to super close views of a rare visitor to Cardiff in later September (below) (A Common tern up close, 26 September).

Little terns (Sternula albifrons) breed at Chesil beach in Weymouth and I saw several of these little beauties during an earlier visit to Weymouth, at Ferrybridge, on 10 June, though I didn’t see any of the chicks and my photos from that visit only showed distant specks along the beach. I managed to get better, though still not close views of Little terns during my second Weymouth visit – these are included in a post about Lodmoor’s distant birds, 7 August (shown below).

We had an Arctic tern (Sterna paradisaea) visitor in Cardiff Bay in September but it was always too distant for anything other than distant blurry record photographs, which is why I didn’t blog about that sighting. And my final tern species for the year was the Sandwich tern (Thalasseus sandvicensis) (below). These beauties were on show at Ferrybridge on 9 September and at Lodmoor on 11 September (Sandwich terns, 19 September). It was a terrific year for terns!

Sandwich terns

19 Friday Sep 2025

Posted by sconzani in autumn, birds

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birding, birdwatching, British birds, British terns, Ferrybridge birding, RSPB Lodmoor, Sandwich tern, tern species

These beauties are the last of the birds I’ll share from my recent trip to Weymouth: Sandwich terns (Sterna sandvicensis). Though some tern species can be tricky to tell apart (Common and Arctic, in particular), with their yellow-tipped black beaks, black legs and black-capped heads, Sandwich terns are a bit more straight forward to identify.

~ Sandwich terns seen here with mostly Mediterranean gulls, Dunlin & Ringed plover

As you can perhaps see in my photos, the black cap on its head is not a permanent feature; it is fully black at the beginning of the breeding season but then quickly begins to develop white speckles above the eyes and, by the end of the summer, the whole of the forehead is white, making the ‘hair do’ resemble more of a monk’s tonsure. I guess the stress of raising young will do that, even to terns!

I didn’t know much about these birds but my guide book tells me that Sandwich terns breed in northern Europe (including in colonies around the coast of Britain), Russia and North America, then move south, which is when they can be seen in southern Britain, on passage to their wintering locations, mostly on the west coast of Africa.

If you’re wondering, as I was, about the origin of its name, in Fauna Britannica, Stefan Buczacki tells that ‘Its association with the town of Sandwich on the Kent coast dates back to 1785, when the naturalist John Latham was sent specimens collected from there by some local boys’.