Terns

Graceful, glamorous and audacious, returning terns are awaited with excitement by birders every spring. This comprehensive addition to Collins’ iconic New Naturalist series has been long expected, and covers all five ‘true tern’ species that breed in Britain, plus all the forms that have occurred as vagrants, including American Black Tern.

The book begins with a very contemporary overview of a full 39 tern species, fashionably splitting Cabot’s Tern from Sandwich, as well as excluding noddies and White Tern due to their rather distant genetic connection, and including all the terns and gulls under the umbrella of the family Laridae. An overview of all the major groups and species is provided, including world distribution maps, and another chapter on their ecology and behaviour follows, with the accent on foraging.

A lengthy overview of the group’s breeding biology is welcome, tying in the nesting strategies, displays and chick-rearing methods of the different genera, before many of the species’ epic migrations are précised, a little abruptly for my tastes. A history of terns in Britain is illuminating, but the meat of the book is the species accounts, and all five of our breeding terns are given a thorough description in their own chapters.

Distribution, population trends, individual behavioural quirks and migration are tallied for each, and these sections hold much new and esoteric information, as well as robust summaries of the majority of the research. Terns are fragile and easily disturbed seabirds and a fairly long chapter on their conservation is justified, but hardened birders will also be keen to know that all our vagrant forms are covered in terms of their historical records, identification and the probable geographical sources of the birds that arrive lost on our shores.

It wouldn’t be a New Naturalist without an appendix or two, and these go into the finer detail of population trends and science, as well as an insight into research methods used.

The book is lavishly illustrated with photographs, with particularly enthralling sequences of courtship in all five main species (involving myriad ways in which to present a fish to a tern’s heart’s desire). The statistical findings of on-the-ground researchers are fittingly summarised in easy-to-understand colour graphics, and an almost complete picture of the daily and seasonal lives of these attractive ‘sea swallows’ is given.

While there are constant threats to all, particularly from foxes and human disturbance in the case of Little Tern, all British breeding terns have increased over the last decade, after a decline, due in part at least to the efforts of conservationists. This volume should provide great inspiration to make a visit to the hubbub of a mixed tern colony, and to gain an informed interpretation of the activities you see there. Make sure you wear a hat, though!