Black Tern

I had a choice of three pictures today. The first was a general picture of assorted birds all gathered together, roughly along the lines of by previous Bird Watching blip from August, the second was a sweet chestnut tree, probably cropped to show an emerging chestnut and the third was a definitely iffy photo of a Black Tern - you've got the Black Tern.

As there was a weather window today up until mid afternoon I thought I'd make the most of it, so up at six, out by seven and bird watching at Wilstone Reservoir by eight. There had been a Little Stint around for the past four days that I wanted to see, but it had also made use of the weather window and moved on. Still there was plenty of other stuff to see, the highlight for me was when I found a Black Tern resting on a far away buoy. I reckoned it was closer to the far side of the reservoir and in that the sun was better from that side, I wandered round. It's resting point was still too far away for my lens, but it was also fairly active flying round and feeding over the reservoir, so the next couple of hours was spent trying to capture it in flight. The above is about as good as it got, which isn't that good, but it's the first ever Black Tern I've seen, so it's pretty special to me.

Black Terns used to breed in the UK but disappeared as wetland areas, particularly the East Anglian Fens, were drained. It's now seen only on migration. This one will be off to spend its winter probably at sea along the African west coast probably around Ghana, although some also winter in the Nile Valley and in the Indian Ocean.