 |
| Bridled Tern |
On Saturday 1st of June a very rare Bridled Tern was found in amongst the seabird colonies on Coquet Island a mile or so off the coast of Northumberland. This attractive Tern resides in my infamous mega dips category, see here. Coquet Island is famous as the location of a small colony of breeding Roseate Terns, the UK’s rarest breeding tern. It is possible to do a coastal tour of the island with a company called Puffin Cruises and, in fact, Jeremy and I did this very trip to see the Roseate Terns in 2018. No one is allowed to disembark on the island, which has a permeant warden in breeding season, for obvious reasons.
Coquet island at 275 miles distant from home is a good 4 hour drive and during the week I blew hot and cold as to whether to visit. My mind was eventually made up when Wayne, who runs our “twitching the UK and Ireland” WhatsApp group, very kindly offered to organise some bespoke cruises to the island for birders. The boat trip is very tide and sea condition dependent and trips, with a strict limit of 40 birders on each, were proposed for 17:30 on Saturday and 18:30 on Sunday. As an added incentive sea conditions indicated that no further cruises would be possible until the end of the following week. So I quickly messaged Wayne and got myself booked on the Saturday cruise. It’s a good job I did as both cruises were quicky fully booked up by birders eager to see this mega rare bird.
I decided to stay locally on the Saturday night, I really didn’t fancy a 550 mile round trip drive in one day, and so booked myself into the cheapest local Premier Inn I could find. My plan was to get up at 05:00 on Saturday morning, help Carolyn with the horses and then leave home at 07:00 latest. With rest stops this would get me to Amble harbour, where the boat departed from, just after midday. On arrival I planned to scope the island from some mainland sand dunes where other birders had managed distant views and then visit the local tern colony at Long Nanny before getting back to Amble in good time to catch the boat.
With windy conditions shaking my scope around and bad midday heat haze I rapidly gave up on the idea of scoping the bird from the mainland and set off to Long Nanny. I’ve never been there before and I managed to go to entirely the wrong location but eventually parked up in the correct place and made the short walk across the sandy beach to the roped off area where the terns were nesting. There is a very active Artic tern colony here with one very surprising visitor, a female American Black Tern which is currently considered a subspecies of the european Black Tern. It has been returning to Long Nanny for a number of springs but this year an astonishing event has occurred. It has paired with an Artic Tern and laid two eggs which it is now incubating. As far as I’m able to ascertain, and please correct me if I’m wrong, this is the first time these two species have attempted to hybridise. It may well be the case that the two species are sufficiently separated that the eggs will not be fertile. If they are it will be fascinating to see what the chicks are like as the American Black Tern is, not surprisingly, mainly black and the Artic is white and light grey. Hybridisation in other Tern species is not unknown with examples of Artic x Rosette in the literature. The nest is close to a viewpoint by the wardens shed in amongst the Artic Tern nests but a little obscured by sea grass. The colony was a buzz of loud activity with Artic Terns continuously coming and going. The Artic Tern is, again I believe, the longest distant avian migrator spending the spring and summer breeding mainly in the Artic region and then migrating to the Antarctic in our winter for the Antarctic summer. I spent a very pleasant hour at Long Nanny before returning to Amble for the main event.
 |
| American Black Tern on nest |
 |
| Artic Tern |
I got back to Amble harbour around 16:30 and chatted to other birders while we waited for our boat to arrive. Our cruise was with the same company that runs Puffin Cruises and our friendly captain, Steve, soon had us loaded on the boat and off on the 20 minute or so trip out to the island. At this time of year Coquet is absolutely teeming with breeding sea birds with other species of Tern, Puffins and Kittiwakes absolutely everywhere. Luckily, having already done a number of regular Puffin cruise trips to the island that day, Steve knew exactly where the Bridled Tern was and took us straight to its location. After a short panic when other birders got on the bird and I couldn’t see it, I found the bird sitting amongst the Puffins on the slope towards the top of the island.
The Bridled Tern, with just 25 UK records prior to 2022, is a true 3 start mega rarity. It is very much a marine bird wintering widely through tropical oceans, so I guess that it would be rather nonplussed by our typical British summer! There are a number of subspecies but I guess this is most likely to be the Atlantic melanopterus subspecies which breeds in Mexico, the Caribbean and west Africa. It is a similar size to our Common Tern but is somewhat more heavily built. The wings and deeply forked tail are long, and it has dark grey upperparts and white underparts. The forehead and eyebrows are white, as is a striking collar on the hindneck. It has black legs and bill. As such It is unlikely to be confused with any other species of tern apart from the similarly dark-backed Sooty Tern which itself has only been recorded 21 times in the UK.
Our boat was rolling quite heavily in the swell making it impossible to get a reasonable focus lock on the bird for any length of time. I hence adopted the well know “point and prey” approach of pointing the camera where the bird was and firing off lots of shots in the hope that some would both capture the bird and be in focus. For this to work I had the R5 shutter speed set to a minimum of 1/2000 second in auto ISO mode. I was using the bare 500mm lens without extenders and varied the F number from a fully open F4 ( giving the lowest ISO speed) up to f10 (giving me more depth of field). Luckily, there were indeed a few semi reasonable shots in amongst the full memory card I shot.
 |
| A few Puffins! |
 |
| Spot the Roseate tern! |
It was a great outing and once again many thanks indeed to Wayne Glossip for organising it. After a celebratory beer and steak I was really wiped and crashed out at my hotel very pleased that I was not driving back until the morning
Footnote
Tern species on the UK list – I have seen the ones in red so just 6 to go. The numbers in brackets indicate previous UK records so there is no realistic hope of seeing them all!
Gull-billed Tern |
Caspian Tern |
Royal Tern (3) |
Lesser Crested Tern (9) |
Sandwich Tern |
Cabot's Tern (1!) |
Elegant Tern |
Little Tern |
Least Tern (1!) |
Aleutian Tern (1!) |
Bridled Tern |
Sooty Tern (21) |
Roseate Tern |
Common Tern |
Arctic Tern |
Forster's Tern |
Whiskered Tern |
White-winged Black Tern |
Black Tern |
Comments
Post a Comment