terns

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Things I’d Never Seen ….

July 30, 2011 Animal Behavior

As little as I’ve been out in the field with my camera lately (relative to how it used to be), I’ve had a disproportionate number of firsts in terms of wildlife viewings. Some of it is my change of environment and the newness of Seattle and its wild offspring. And some of it is, well [...]

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Thumbnail image for The Turns of Terns

The Turns of Terns

June 6, 2011 Animal Behavior

I’ve described terns, with their distinct calls, as aerial barflies with too much whiskey and smoke on the voice box. Each tern is raspy in its own way, and Caspian Terns have a sharp croak that pierces the air over my balcony. They’re huddled on a warehouse rooftop one minute, hundreds of them, blurred by [...]

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Forster’s in Flight

April 15, 2010 Gulls & Terns

When you first encounter terns, their mid-air, hairpin turns seem unpredictable and difficult to capture — especially since these birds are quite small when you’re thinking about filling the frame.

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More Alameda Terns: Caspian, Forster’s, Least Terns

May 5, 2009 Bay Area

Take a look at this image of terns — not because it’s anything spectacular. In fact, those terns were but specks on my visual horizon, so this is a dramatic crop to show just one thing: the size differential between the Caspian Terns and the Forster’s Terns I wrote about in a previous post. The [...]

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There is a Season … Terns (Alameda Terns)

April 18, 2009 Bay Area

Lame Byrds pun aside . . . Forster’s Tern Nation in Alameda – Sterna forsteri ** Photo usage and restrictions Their gravelly call precedes them, these Forster’s Terns (Sterna forsteri) with their fuzzy black berets and orange feet. They sound like aerial barflys with too much whiskey and smoke on the voice box. When it’s [...]

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