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Elegant tern | Thalasseus elegans
Sierlijke stern | Charrán elegante
A tern of the American Pacific coast that has not stayed a one-off in Europe. Birds have held territory inside sandwich tern colonies for years at a time, paired with sandwich terns and raised young, so the identification problem now includes their offspring.
Voice
A grating, rolling kerr-eeek, longer, more nasal and more clearly rising than sandwich tern's call. In a mixed colony the voice often gives a bird away before the orange bill does. Learn it from recordings before travelling, because in a noisy roost the difference is one syllable's worth of length.
No freely licensed recording is available for this species yet.
Identification
Between Sandwich and Royal Tern in size but noticeably slimmer and longer-looking. The bill is long, thin and evenly tapered, drooping slightly towards the tip, orange at the base and yellower distally. The black crest is long and spikes well down the nape. Upperparts pale grey, underparts white with a pink flush when breeding; out of the breeding season the forehead whitens but the eye stays inside the black.
Confusion species
Three comparisons. Against Royal Tern: bigger and heavier, with a thick, straight orange-red bill, a blockier head, a broad white forehead in non-breeding plumage that leaves the eye standing clear in white, and obviously dark outer primaries on the underwing. Elegant tern is smaller and finer, keeps the eye inside the black even in winter, shows that long thin drooping bill, and has an almost wholly white underwing with only a narrow dark trailing edge. Against sandwich tern: the black bill with a yellow tip, shorter and straighter, and the shorter crest. The real difficulty is Sandwich × Elegant hybrids, which genuinely occur in the Ebro Delta and southern France: they sit exactly in between, with a dull orange bill smudged darker, or a dirty yellow one, a crest of intermediate length and a mantle of intermediate tone. Such birds cannot be settled from one photograph. They need to be followed across seasons, and in several cases only genetic work has separated a pure elegant tern from a hybrid.
Habitat
Saltpans, shallow coastal lagoons, sandbars and shell beaches in deltas, and the shallow sea in front of them. In the Americas it nests on bare, hot islets in the Gulf of California and in commercial salt works; in Europe it means birds inside or beside sandwich tern colonies, and resting birds on spits and sandflats.
Where the bird is most at home, classified with EUNIS — the European standard for habitats.
Range and movements
Almost the entire world population nests on Isla Rasa in the Gulf of California, with smaller colonies in Baja California and southern California, and winters down the Pacific coast to Chile. European records are heavily concentrated in Iberia and France, with the Ebro delta as the fixed point: birds are present at the Punta de la Banya colony in many springs, and there are also records from the Camargue and the Banc d'Arguin. North of there they are scattered, with birds in Ireland, Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium among others.
How and when to look
The best chance is the Ebro delta, where birds can be expected at the Punta de la Banya colony most springs between May and July; scan the colony from the distance the reserve rules require. Colour alone is a trap: wet or backlit sandwich tern bills can flash warm, so look instead for a bill profile that is too long, too thin and droops at the tip. If you find a candidate, photograph the bill profile, the crest and, if the bird lifts, the underwing, and note whether it is ringed, since some of the delta's birds are marked and it is that individual history that settles elegant tern or hybrid. Closer to home, scan sandwich tern roosts and passage flocks in June and July on the Dutch Delta coast, the Wadden flats, or coastal reserves in Britain and Ireland.
Conservation status
Near Threatened, and the reason is concentration rather than headcount: the great majority of the world population breeds on a single island. A failure of sardine and anchovy stocks in a warm sea year can cost an entire season, and disturbance or an introduced predator on Isla Rasa would hit the species at one stroke. The island is now protected and the removal of rats and mice there has helped.
Scientific name
Thalasseus elegans | (Gambel, 1849)
Gambel described the species in 1849 as Sterna elegans; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Thalasseus was introduced in 1822 by Boie. Thalasseus derives from Ancient Greek thalassa 'sea'. elegans is Latin for 'elegant, fine'. The specimen the first description was based on came from Mazatlán, Mexico.