ON THE WILD SIDE

WE don’t get very many terns where I live but I have fond memories of the charming gull-cousins from my childhood in Norfolk.

My family always wondered what on earth I was talking about when I said how excited I was to see the “Boofbirds”, until one day they saw the delicate white gliders hovering over the sea, then dropping into the water with a loud: “Boof!”

Memories on hand, I was honoured to be graced with the sight of a small group of five Arctic terns hunting at a local beach, on their passage migration up to the north of the country.

They’ve flown a long way to get here, so I think it’s only right to talk about their amazing journey.

There are several species of tern that nest here in the UK, and they are all fairly similar.

They are in the same family as gulls, and are superficially similar to them with their white underparts and grey wings.

But they are much daintier birds with needle-pointed beaks – and all adult birds in the UK have a black cap in the summer.

Some terns can be hard to tell apart, but with a good close look you can tell which species you are looking at by their size and the colour of their beaks and legs. The Arctic tern has red legs, and is the only British species with an all red beak (the common has a black-tipped beak). Their delicate bodies and long forked tails give them the apt nickname of “sea swallow”. As mentioned, they are known for hovering and diving into the water at high speed after small fish, but unlike the much larger gannet who does a more impressive dive, they actually have nostrils.

Now on to the migration. These birds will soon be spending their summer breeding in a few spots on our coasts, as well as in the very north of the whole world, into the Arctic Circle. Once they are done, they follow the sun and fly southward along the coasts of the world to the Antarctic. They see more sunlight than any creature on the planet, seeing in two summers a year, and migrate further than any animal. At the very minimum they fly about 30,000 miles a year, and some fly more like 50,000.

In their 30-year lifespan, a single Arctic tern will have flown the distance from Earth to the Moon and back THREE TIMES! That’s a long way to go for summer sun.