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Roseate Tern | Sterna dougallii
Dougalls stern | Charrán común
The Roseate Tern is the palest and most elegant of the medium-sized terns: a near-white bird with a jet-black cap, a long thin dark bill and two tail streamers trailing behind it like threads. Early in the breeding season a soft rosy flush lies over the underparts — the colour that gave it its English and Spanish names, and that usually fades within a few weeks. In Australia it is a bird of the tropical reefs and coral cays.
Voice
The characteristic call is a sharp, high kik, shorter and thinner than a Common Tern's, alongside a soft two-syllable chu-wit that stands out at once over a mixed colony. On disturbance this becomes a low, hard rattle of staccato notes, a raw aach that almost grates. In a flock of terns over a reef the voice is often the first thing to betray that a Roseate is among them.
No freely licensed recording has been found for this species yet; what to listen for is described below.
Identification
A medium-sized, slender tern of a good thirty centimetres, a fair share of it tail, and at just over a hundred grams strikingly light. In breeding plumage it is very pale: a light grey mantle close to white, a jet-black cap and white underparts carrying a soft rosy flush early in the season. The bill is long, thin and black, with a red base at the height of the season; the legs are bright orange-red. The tail streamers are white and so long that on a perched bird they project far beyond the wingtips. In flight the upperwing is almost uniformly pale, with dark confined to the outer two or three primaries, and the beat is stiffer, faster and shallower than a Common Tern's. Young birds are coarsely dark-scaled on the mantle, with a black bill and dark legs.
Confusion species
Common Tern (Sterna hirundo) is greyer on mantle and underparts, has an orange-red bill with a black tip and streamers no longer than the wingtip. Arctic Tern (Sterna paradisaea) has a blood-red bill without a black tip, short legs and grey underparts setting off a white cheek stripe. White-fronted Tern (Sterna striata) is the awkward one in the south: also pale, also black-billed and also long-tailed, but it keeps a white forehead between bill and black cap all year and shows a clear dark wedge in the outer primaries in flight. Black-naped Tern (Sterna sumatrana) shares its tropical reefs and its pale, almost white plumage, but never has a full black cap: only a black band running from the eye to the nape across a white crown. The surest separation remains the combination of a long dark bill, ice-pale upperparts, orange-red legs and two white streamers trailing like threads behind the bird.
Habitat
Warm, clear coastal seas and the water above coral reefs and shallow sandbanks; it likes to fish over shoals of small fish driven to the surface by predatory fish. It breeds on bare or sparsely vegetated coral cays, rocky islets and shell beaches, often tucked under overhanging vegetation or among boulders, which makes it hard to find among the open colonies of other terns. It barely enters estuaries or inland water.
Where the bird is most often found, arranged by main group and formation.
Range and movements
Within this guide's map window a tropical Australian breeder. On the west side it occupies the island groups off the Pilbara and Kimberley coasts, from the Houtman Abrolhos northward; on the east side the cays of the Great Barrier Reef, the Torres Strait and the islets of the Coral Sea. Outside the breeding season it spreads across the neighbouring tropical seas; it seldom reaches far south, and it is not to be expected in New Zealand. Worldwide it also breeds in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, but those populations stand apart from the Australian one.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
Where and when to look
Look for it on a reef or sandbank where terns are resting, and check the tail first: a bird whose white streamers project well beyond the folded wingtips is nearly always one. Then check the legs — bright orange-red, far more vivid than on the pale terns beside it — and listen for the short high kik, which cuts through the grating of crested terns.
Conservation
Not globally threatened (LC), but that is an average over very unequal populations: those of the northwest Atlantic and northwest Europe are small and strictly protected, while the tropical populations, the Australian among them, are large. Its vulnerability is the colony site: it breeds on low coral and sand islets that a cyclone can flood in a night, and that are reachable by rats, cats and visitors. Add that eggs are still taken in parts of the tropics, and that as a feeding specialist it is sensitive to the loss of the shoals of small fish it lives on.
Scientific name
Sterna dougallii | Montagu, 1813
George Montagu described the species in 1813 as Sterna dougallii; it still stands in the same genus, so author and year carry no parentheses. Sterna comes from Old English stearn, an old name for terns. The epithet dougallii honours the Scottish physician Peter McDougall, who sent Montagu the first specimen; the type locality is the Cumbrae Islands in the Firth of Clyde, Scotland. The Dutch name names the man who sent the bird in, while the English name names the rosy flush on the breast.