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Common tern | Sterna hirundo
Visdief | Charrán común
The common tern is the tern you can meet almost anywhere, from tidal sandbank to flooded gravel pit, hovering and then hitting the water after small fish. That very familiarity makes it the reference point for every other tern.
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Voice
Piercing and sharp. The contact call is a downslurred kreee-arr, accelerating when agitated into a rattling kik-kik-kik over the colony. Heard from late April into August; largely silent at sea outside the breeding season.
Recording: Mdf — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Identification
Slender, with long narrow wings and a deeply forked tail whose streamers just reach the wingtip at rest. Summer adult: black cap, orange-red bill with a black tip, short red legs, pale grey body. In flight a dark wedge shows on the outer primaries above, and from below only the inner primaries are translucent.
Confusion species
Arctic tern: blood-red bill without a black tip, strikingly short legs, longer streamers, and an evenly translucent hand below with a neat narrow dark trailing edge. Sandwich tern is bigger and paler with a yellow-tipped black bill and shaggy crest. Little tern is far smaller with a white forehead and yellow bill.
Habitat
Shallow clear water beside a safe, bare nesting site: shell banks, saltmarsh edges and islets in coastal lagoons, but equally rafts and gravel islands in flooded pits and industrial waters.
Where the bird is most at home, classified with EUNIS — the European standard for habitats.
Range and movements
Breeds across Europe from the Baltic coast to Iberia. The Netherlands is a stronghold, with colonies in the Delta, the Wadden Sea and around the IJsselmeer, often on purpose-built islands. In Spain mainly the Ebro Delta, the Guadalquivir marshes, the Cádiz saltpans and the Galician coast; all birds move to West Africa.
- Resident
- Breeding (summer)
- Passage
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
May and June at a colony, watched from a dyke or hide at a respectful distance. Concentrate on birds arriving with a fish: bill colour, leg length and tail streamers all show in one view. Coastal passage peaks in August.
Conservation status
Numerous but fragile, because the species depends entirely on managed nesting islands. Storm flooding, predation by foxes and gulls, disturbance on beaches, and the availability of small fish close to the colony decide breeding success from year to year.
Scientific name
Sterna hirundo | Linnaeus, 1758
Linnaeus described the species in 1758 and placed it straight away in the genus where it still stands. He introduced the genus Sterna in that same work. Sterna goes back to Old English stearn, which appears in the poem The Seafarer; the Frisians used a related word for terns. hirundo is Latin for 'swallow', after the forked tail and light build the tern shares with that bird. The specimen the first description was based on came from Sweden.