Home › Volumes › Game Birds › Gulls and Terns
Common Tern — Part 2
Images coming soon.
Should the visitor reach the island in July, he will find great numbers of downy young chicks running about, but quite dependent on their parents for grasshoppers, beetles, small fish, and smaller insects that are the approved diet for young terns. The young are tame as chickens; but the old birds at this time are especially bold and resentful of intrusion. Darting down to a clamoring chick, a parent thrusts a morsel down its throat without alighting, and is off again for more, and still more. Later the food is simply dropped for the fledglings to help themselves. Still later, little broods are led to the ocean's edge, sand shoals, or the marshes, to hunt on their own account; and by September, old and young congregate in great groups to follow the movement of the blue fish, that pursue the very small fish, "shiners," that they also feed on.
But whether flirting, nesting, hunting, or flying at leisure, there is a refreshing joyousness about the tern that makes it a delight to watch. In the very excess of good spirits one will plunge beneath the water after a little fish, then mounting into the air again, it will deliberately drop it from its bill for another tern to dash after, and the new possessor will toss it to still another member of the jolly flock, and so keep up the game until the fish is finally swallowed. It has been suggested that terns go through this performance to kill the fish, as a cat plays with a mouse; but it is only occasionally they play the game of catch and toss, and when all the company seem to be in the mood for the fun.
Another beautiful sight is the pose of a tern just before alighting, when, with long, pointed wings held for a moment high above its back, they flutter like the wings of a butterfly. But then it would be difficult to name a posture of this graceful bird that is not beautiful, unless we except the act of scratching its head with one foot while on the wing; and this is, perhaps, more amusing than lovely. This sea swallow also has the accomplishment of opening and shutting its tail like a fan, so that one moment it will look like a single pointed feather, and the next it may be narrowly forked or widely stretched into an open triangle. While flying, the birds are exceedingly watchful, jerking their heads now this way, now that, with nervous quickness, all the time keeping their "bill pointing straight downward, which makes them look curiously like colossal mosquitoes," to quote Dr. Coues's famous comparison. By the middle of October the terns migrate southward from the New England and Long Island waters to enjoy the perpetual summer, of which they seem to be a natural exponent.