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In the West Indies, the eggs of roseate and sooty terns are believed to be aphrodisiacs, and are disproportionately targeted by egg collectors. [citation needed] Tern skins and feathers have long been used for making items of clothing such as capes and hats, and this became a large-scale activity in the second half of the nineteenth century ...
Common tern Conservation status Least Concern (IUCN 3.1) Scientific classification Domain: Eukaryota Kingdom: Animalia Phylum: Chordata Class: Aves Order: Charadriiformes Family: Laridae Genus: Sterna Species: S. hirundo Binomial name Sterna hirundo Linnaeus, 1758 Breeding Resident Non-breeding Passage Vagrant (seasonality uncertain) Synonyms Sterna fluviatilis (Naumann, 1839) Twisted head The ...
Breeding plumage Eggs, Collection Museum Wiesbaden. The royal tern nests on island beaches or isolated beaches with limited predators. It lays one or two eggs, usually in a scrape, an area on the ground where a tern has made a small hole to lay its eggs. In some cases, tern eggs are laid directly on the ground, not in a scrape.
Other names for the species include angel tern and white noddy in English, and manu-o-Kū in Hawaiian. in the Cook Islands, it is known as the kakaia. The little white tern ( Gygis microrhyncha ), previously considered a subspecies of the white tern ( Gygis alba microrhyncha ), is now recognised as a separate species.
The greater crested tern is a large tern with a long (5.4–6.5 cm or 2.1–2.6 in) yellow bill, black legs, and a glossy black crest that is noticeably shaggy at its rear. The breeding adult of the nominate subspecies T. b. bergii is 46–49 cm (18–19.5 in) long, with a 125–130 cm (49–51 in) wing-span; this subspecies weighs 325–397 g ...
The white-fronted tern (Sterna striata), also known as tara, sea swallow, [2] black-billed tern, kahawai bird, southern tern, [3] or swallow tail, [4] was first described by Johann Friedrich Gmelin in 1789. [3] A medium-sized tern with an all-white body including underwing and forked tail, with pale grey hues on the mantle and upper side of the ...
The Sandwich tern is a medium-large tern with grey upperparts, white underparts, a yellow-tipped black bill, and a shaggy black crest which becomes less extensive in winter with a white crown. Young birds bear grey and brown scalloped plumage on their backs and wings. It is a vocal bird. It nests in a ground scrape and lays one to three eggs.
Forster's tern is a member of the gull and tern family Laridae; it has also been treated like other terns in their own family Sternidae by some authors. Forster's tern was named by Thomas Nuttall in honor of Johann Reinhold Forster, the German naturalist who first suggested it differed from the common tern. [5]