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Posted by Charles E. Strehl on 16:31:32 02/15/09
Having family members arriving at Estero Island Beach Club on Ft. Myers Beach yesterday (Saturday, Feb. 14) and having a few free minutes, my wife and I decided to walk the beach. The weather was very unusual. A cool breeze off the Gulf produced a dense fog. I d say visibility was perhaps 500 feet over the beach and much less out to sea. Didn t matter for glancing at the birds. We did not have binoculars. We enjoyed ten-foot away views of willet, royal term, sandwich tern, and Forster s tern on the sand. Many birds looked uncomfortable in the chilly mist.
A few terns were feeding along the beach. We glanced at them and, not having binoculars, had fun identifying them from bill color, form, and structure. Good practice w.o. optics. Almost back and not thinking much anymore about the birds I glanced at another bird flying by. I stopped in my tracks. My first sub-conscious reaction was that looks like a tropic bird. Then looking closely I scoffed at that suggestion. It was surely a tern, but what kind. The tail streamers were outrageous. The crest was almost complete. The bill was small and dark. The bird was virtually white. Too pale for a Forster s and the tail was much too long. The bill was small and dark. It gave short stiff wing strokes. I exclaimed and pointed the bird out to my wife. She commented on the tail. I said, Yes, and notice the color of the bird. Pale all over. No? She agreed.
The bird flew about fifty yards down the beach and vanished in the mist but soon returned and flew past again. Then, amazingly, it turned over the beach and landed with a group of terns about thirty feet from us. Clearly uncomfortable, it paused only a second or two and flew again. But the landing gave us a comparison with the standing Forster s and Sandwich terns. We noticed that the legs were dark but shorter than those of the Forster s terns. The bill was also smaller. The streaming tail drew the eye even when perched. In the air it dove once, vertically into the sea from about 20-30 feet elevation, and then coursed up the beach and was lost forever into the fog.
I have struggled with this bird since seeing it. I have tried to turn it into a Forster s tern, but can t. I am left with calling it a roseate tern, but without even a binocular view and no photograph, can hardly defend the call. I have seen this bird only a few times and so am not very familiar with it. But I don t know what else to call it and will certainly record it as such on my list.
I can suppose that it reached the beach because of the peculiar weather conditions. Still, I have not heard that roseate terns frequent the Gulf here, even out of sight of land.
Anyone have any thoughts or comments? I welcome them.
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