THE COMMON TERN.
The Common Tern.
(Sterna fluviatilis.)
This birds nests in companies, in grassy places near a river bank, where a nest, without any foundation, is made, being a flat hollow in the ground. In this it lays two or three eggs of a clay-or brownish-yellow colour, speckled with violet-grey and brown. The Tern is a real ornament to our large rivers and lakes, with its guileless nature and its fine swinging flight. If it were to disappear we should lose one of the joys and beauties of life. All day long it flies over the water, with only short intervals of rest which it takes on a gravel heap or a hurdle, with neck drawn in and pointed upwards, only turning its head now and then to look at the water. It constantly flies at the same height, and as soon as its prey comes to the surface of the water it spreads its tail stiffly downwards, and hovers, beating with its wings, and gazing fixedly on the spot where the victim showed itself. Then, suddenly, it drops like a stone, with a loud splash, into the water. It has then secured its booty, usually a small fish. Its usual voice sounds like “Kriey”; sometimes, when in trouble, it utters a light “Kek” or “Krek.” It is not common enough in Hungary to do much mischief.
In Great Britain we find the Common Tern along the shores of the Channel and up the West coast as far as the Isle of Skye, and again from the Moray Firth down to Kent. In Ireland it is plentiful in the South. “Three species at least of the beautiful terns, well within my own time, bred freely in this country; but their colonies on the flats and the foreshores have been harried for eggs and birds so persistently, season after season, that they have ceased to exist as breeding places. A few hatch out in lonely shingle runs here and there on the coast lines; others have changed their breeding grounds for good. The ring-dotterels have suffered in the same way, but, from their different nesting habits nothing like so much as the terns have done. When dogs are trained for egg hunting, and the capture of young birds alive, without hurting them, is it to be wondered at if the poor birds shift elsewhere? The size of a place has nothing to do with its nesting capacities; if the conditions are favourable, there the birds will come in their seasons to settle down. If they are not interfered with they will come again, until at last you may count on their arrival almost to a day. One place I frequently visit, where the birds, water-fowl and waders have been protected for forty years, not by keepers or lookers, but by the people that pass that way, because the owner of a fine sheet of water desired that they might not be frightened. This is as it should be, yet for all that they are wild birds pure and simple, free to come and go just as they please, according as their inclinations move them.”[7]
The Common Tern is 14·25 inches in length but its long wings and tail make it appear larger. The legs are red, the feet webbed. Beak red with a sharp point; crown and nape quite black; mantle a fine bluish grey. Throat and breast beautifully white; wing feathers darkish. Tail forked like that of the House Swallow. The longest, outer side feathers, which form the fork, are dark grey, the other tail feathers, and the rump white. The eye reddish-brown.