Common Tern with Tiny Chick

The final morning of our short Nickerson Beach tour. I'm backblipping it the next day because in the afternoon I drove four hours to our PVPA (photo club) evening meeting further east than Northampton; when I sat down afterwards to go through the day's images I found myself falling asleep.

This Common Tern (Sterna hirundo) had two chicks--three days and less than a day old respectively; I don't know which this one is, but its sibling is under the parent (probably just visible on the left). The hatchlings are semiprecocial--that is, they are mobile, but remain around the nest (just a scrape in the sand) and are fed, in this case by both parents--we did see both. The chick's egg tooth (for breaking out of its shell) is visible as a white dot at the end of its bill.

The three days with Arthur Morris and Denise Ippolito were exhilarating but exhausting (I'm still in recovery mode as I write); my three blips start here.) On the last day we saw another case of predation: a common tern chick was again the victim, but this time captured not by a peregrine falcon (as I blipped on the second day), but by a great black-backed gull (they are large and very aggressive). I got good photos of that event but decided to post a happier image.