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Lesser Noddy | Anous tenuirostris
Kleine noddy | Tiñosa Picofina
The Lesser Noddy is a slender, dark tern of the western Indian Ocean with a conspicuously pale grey cap. Almost the entire world population breeds on a handful of island groups; in southern Africa it is a rare vagrant, usually brought in by a cyclone.
Voice
Seldom heard at sea. At colonies a dry, rattling churr and a soft, crowing call.
Recording: Ross Gallardy — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
About 32 cm, a small, slim noddy with narrow wings and a wedge-shaped tail. The plumage is dark greyish brown, a little darker than in the Brown Noddy, with a pale grey to greyish-white crown and hindcrown sharply demarcated from the dark neck and lores; a white crescent below the eye. The underwing is uniformly dark, without paler coverts. The bill is black, long and noticeably thin and straight. Sexes alike; juveniles have a less contrasting cap.
Confusion species
Brown Noddy (Anous stolidus) is larger and bulkier, with a shorter, thicker, slightly decurved bill, a whiter forehead that grades into the grey hindcrown, paler underwing coverts and a slower, heavier flight. Juvenile Sooty Terns (Onychoprion fuscatus) are larger, with a forked tail, pale spots on the upperparts and a pale belly.
Habitat
Warm tropical ocean. It often feeds in large flocks over shoals of predatory fish, closer to the islands than the Brown Noddy. It breeds colonially in trees and shrubs, where the nest of leaves and seaweed is cemented into a platform with droppings.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of southern Africa.
Range and movements
In the region a vagrant off Mozambique and KwaZulu-Natal, usually after cyclones in the Mozambique Channel; only a small number of records. It breeds in the Seychelles, the Maldives and the Chagos Islands and also on the Houtman Abrolhos off Western Australia; outside the breeding season it disperses across the tropical Indian Ocean.
How and when to look
After a cyclone, look carefully along the coast of Zululand and southern Mozambique at every dark tern among the terns on the beach or over the sea. A small, slim noddy with a pale cap and thin bill is worth a photograph; the species is rare enough in the region to be reported.
Conservation status
Not threatened. The population is large but concentrated on few island groups, making it vulnerable to introduced predators, habitat loss on the breeding islands and changes in fish stocks, among other things through tuna fishing.
Scientific name
Anous tenuirostris | (Temminck, 1823)
Temminck described the species in 1823 as Sterna tenuirostris; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Anous was introduced in 1826 by Stephens. Anous is Greek for 'stupid, silly' — for the tameness with which noddies allowed sailors to approach and catch them. tenuirostris comes from the Latin tenuis, 'thin, slender', and rostrum, 'bill' — for the thinner bill than that of Brown Noddy. The specimen the first description was based on came from Seychelles.