buddhabirds: Caspian Tern Traverse City, Michigan #243I’d been…
Caspian Tern
Traverse City, Michigan
#243
I’d been seeing these for a few weeks, I’m pretty sure, but I hadn’t seen one well enough to be confident of the ID. Terns are one of those groups that I’ve tended to avoid in the past as “too hard”, which of course creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: not knowing the bird = avoiding the bird = not knowing the bird. I’m addressing it now, but I’ve needed an unambiguously close view to be sure of my identification.
Devereaux Slough is where they’d been reported most frequently lately, so this morning I got myself up before dawn and headed up there. There were a few tern fly-bys that seemed pretty good for Caspian, but not good enough for me to be sure. I’d resigned myself to going without them yet again when a group of four flew in and landed in the slough. They weren’t as close as I would have liked, but I got the spotting scope on them and cranked up the magnification and… yes! They had the dusky tip on the beak that was the feature I was looking for.
I present to you one of the worst photos ever of Caspian Tern:
Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/173105371736.
Tags: birds, carp without cars, santa barbara county year list, cate.
