When a sandwich tern cries ‘Eric’, summer is on the wane
IN FILEY Bay, the most evocative sound of summer on the wane is the sandwich tern’s two-note scream, often likened to hearing the wheel of an old cart that is badly in need of oil.
Birdwatchers like to transcribe this raucous ‘keeryuk’ cry as “Eric”, which they have adopted as a nickname for the bird.
Last week there were at least two dozen Erics in the bay, where they are as reliable a sight as holidaymakers from Leeds or Sheffield every August.
The birds present an immediate image of being whiter than other terns, and their long black beak with yellow tip and noticeably shorter black legs make them hard to mistake when seen through binoculars.
Otherwise they are easily distinguishable by size from their more familiar cousins, the common and arctic tern, being the largest tern found in the UK.
Besides looking heavier and having a longer wingspan than other terns when seen plunge diving for fish over the bay’s inshore waters, the adults also have black feathers on the backs of their necks.
When excited, these are raised into a crest, and you can watch this happen on quieter parts of Filey’s beach if a dog gets too near to the young birds for parental comfort.
Most of the time, however, the sandwich is surprisingly relaxed about the close proximity of humans.
While common and arctic terns are famous for swooping down to peck the heads of those who intrude on their nesting colonies, it is rare that such aggression is seen from the sandwich.
Sandwich terns don’t nest in Yorkshire but family groups are regularly seen at many places along on the coast in late summer as they head south from established breeding grounds like the Farne Islands and the Firth of Forth.
Northumberland has long been one of their English strongholds to the extent that locals simply call the bird “the tern” and other species “sea swallows”. Of course, the bird didn’t get its full name by being cooked and then eaten between slices of bread. It was first given a name at the Kentish seaside town of Sandwich in 1784. Previously, ornithologists had referred to it as the “great tern”.
Large numbers of the birds are sometimes seen from Spurn in late August and September, with nearly 3,500 recorded on one day in 1964. Thanks to high powered telescopes some young birds making their way south have been seen to wear yellow leg rings, indicating that they had been ringed at colonies on the Northumberland coast.
Very occasionally they turn up inland, with confirmed records at sewage works on the east side of Ilkley and at Gouthwaite Reservoir, in Nidderdale.
It was once thought that the UK’s breeding population of sandwich terns spent winters off West Africa, where young birds remained until their second or third year before coming back to nest. However, it is now known that many birds fly as far as the coast of Argentina and even the Indian Ocean, which makes them perhaps the most well-travelled visitors to Filey each summer.