I know it is anthropomorphic, and therefore wrong, to think of terns as classier versions of gulls. In the proper scientific sense, class should only be considered in the taxonomic sense. But I have found it impossible, over the years, to not think of them that way.
Gulls and terns are all in the larid family but, like a house divided, they are in different subfamilies.
Gulls are jacks of all trades, and near masters of most of them. Sure, they can pluck fish from the sea, crabs from the beach and crickets from the grass. And they can raid the nests of other species, eating eggs and the occasional chick. But they will also Dumpster dive, raid landfills, and steal fish from the beaks of pelicans or ibis, as well the occasional French fry from the hand of an unsuspecting toddler.
Terns, though, don’t fool around with such truck. They know what they are about. They eat fish, plucked from the surface of the water, and only fish. And maybe the occasional shrimp or other crustacean.
Also, where gulls are often mottled and a bit scruffy looking, terns are sleek and sharply plumed in grays and blacks and whites, looking ready to head off to a well-heeled dinner party at any moment.
I didn’t go down to the Reynolds Street Pier the other day to see terns. You can pretty much see them any time you want here. I went down looking for a somewhat rare bird called a neotropical cormorant, which had been reported on eBird, though with a pretty dodgy photo.
There was a group of six or eight tourists, all women, taking iPhone pictures of each other with the blue, blue ocean in the background. I sat on a bench so as not to interrupt their photo session. But impatience got the better of me after 10 or 15 minutes and I eventually excuse me-ed through them to get to the railing at the end of the pier.
Reynolds Street Pier used to be about twice as long as it is now, continuing on straight for a few yards before turning left toward White Street Pier. All that’s left of that section now are the old rusting pilings which extend a few inches to a few feet above the waterline.
Birds were arranged one each along the old pilings.
Neotropic cormorants are a size or so smaller than our usual double-crested cormorants. They also have a white marking that looks like a greater-than sign (>) that outlines the gape of their mouth.
One of the cormorants on the pilings did look a little smaller, though size perception is often not a trustworthy thing. And when it lifted its head and gave me a solid profile, there was no white outlining its gape. It was just another double-crested.
A few pilings down there was a trio of adult pelicans with white and saffron yellow heads that looked neat and trim and ready for the upcoming breeding season. One of them was preening the underside of its wing with its long bill, which made me think of someone trying to scratch their armpit by holding a long ruler in its mouth.
And then there was a trio of royal terns on the nearest pilings.
Royal terns are the default terns in the Florida Keys. They are also the easiest to identify. The most obvious field mark is their sturdy-looking orange bill – orange as a safety vest, a traffic cone, a navel orange. Next it’s the gray wings folded over the white body. Both sexes look alike.
The one I was looking at was in breeding plumage and had a black cowl that came down just below its black eyes, kind of like Zorro’s mask. It had just enough of a crest that it looked a little bit punk, but not so much it couldn’t still get a job. In non-breeding plumage, the black cowl recedes like a hairline, making the eyes far more visible, but the crest remains, giving the tern the look of a middle-aged middle manager who wants you to know he’s still got it.
Royal terns do have something of a regal bearing, as they spend a lot of time staring off into the distance, not acknowledging the other creatures around them. But the name royal was given in reference to them being the largest of the terns. In their scientific name, Thalasseus maximus, maximus also refers to them being the largest of the terns. (Thalasseus essentially means “of the sea.”)
Despite the common and Latin names, though, royal terns are not the largest of the terns. Caspian terns are.
We get Caspian terns down here on occasion. I think I saw eight of them last year, up on Blimp Road on Cudjoe, as opposed to the hundreds, if not thousands, of royal terns I saw. They generally have a blood red bill that sometimes darkens to black at the very tip, something that is easy for the modern birder to distinguish.
Oddly, John Audubon confused the two species all his life, conflating them into a third species he called the Cayenne tern.
Royal terns breed in a few places in Florida, primarily on spoil islands on the Gulf Coast up near Tampa and points north, but also near Jacksonville. They don’t breed in the Keys but are always here in pretty good numbers. I can’t remember a time I’ve walked out on Reynolds Street Pier and not seen at least a half-dozen.
Why do we have so many of them here if they don’t nest here? Royal terns don’t breed until they are at least 4 years old. I don’t notice a lot of immature birds here, but they are indistinguishable from mature birds, at least to us, after the first year. So it’s possible we see a lot of young birds here.
It’s also unclear if royal terns breed every year or, if like albatrosses, they mostly breed every other year.
For whatever reason we see so many of them here, I’m glad. They really class up the place — at least compared to the gulls.
