A tern on a narrowboat at Parkend

Rather late this afternoon I left Gloucester, having completed my shopping chores and my earlier work.  The call of the swallows was too strong to resist, so I drove the few miles south to the bridge at Parkend over the Sharpness canal.  Some of you may have noticed it featuring here rather a lot recently, and mostly because the swallows are always there, flying over the water and catching food for their young in the nests under the swingbridge.

Today was no exception but it was very windy and they were quite hard to film.  But it was delightful and I laughed as usual at their antics, their singing and the beauty of their flight. I also noticed a kestrel patrolling up the length of the canal, on the off chance of catching some stray young birds probably.  The local sparrows and blackbirds were also flying about intently whilst swans cruised up and down on their regular important patrols.

I saw a tern flying up above where I was standing by the bridge and hovering rather like the kestrel.  I heard its call and wondered if there was a mate nearby. It then flew further south and I again concentrated on the swallows.  As I was preparing to leave I suddenly remembered that I'd been very stupid.  I had thought I would be doing some other photography today around town, recording some very mundane views of pavements and kerbs on the streets for the Neighbourhood Plan survey we are conducting.  In fact the survey will happen tomorrow, but I had already altered my camera recording settings to small jpegs. Now I realised that all the pictures I'd taken were not RAW files as usual.  So I decided to stay a little while longer to see if any other views turned up and I reset the camera.

I soon spotted the tern flying a bit further away downstream and saw it suddenly swoop down nearly vertically to dive headfirst into the canal, and surfacing with something in its beak.  I managed to record the impact, but it was too far away for any good detail.  I watched it then fly up and circle around and then it seemed to land on an unoccupied narrowboat moored on a quiet stretch of the canal bank.

I walked slowly towards the boat to see if I could spot the tern as I wanted to properly identify it.  As I passed the rear of the boat I noticed that it was standing on the roof and turned its head around to watch me.  I managed to raise the camera and took a few shots before edging  a bit closer.  But that was too much for it, and off it flew.

They are amazing birds and I have just checked some facts about them.  Apparently they are sometimes called the swallow of the sea, so it  seems to be fitting that I had photographed them both beside each other today.

From Wiki (about the Arctic Tern, although I think this is a Common Tern):
The species is strongly migratory, seeing two summers each year as it migrates along a convoluted route from its northern breeding grounds to the Antarctic coast. Recent studies have shown average annual roundtrip lengths of about 70,900 km (44,100 mi) for birds nesting in Iceland and Greenland[3] and c. 90,000 km (56,000 mi) for birds nesting in the Netherlands.  The Arctic tern flies as well as glides through the air, performing almost all of its tasks in the air. It nests once every one to three years (depending on its mating cycle); once it has finished nesting it takes to the sky for another long southern migration.