April 16, 2017 - Sanibel - Sandwich Terns

Three weeks ago, I showed you photos of Royal Terns from Sanibel Island, Florida. Today I’m featuring another tern species from Sanibel, the Sandwich Tern. This species has gray feathers on its back, tail, and wings. Its belly, neck, and face are white. Winter plumage includes black feathers on the back of the head. When it molts into breeding plumage, the top of the head will also be black. The legs are black and the long black bill is tipped with yellow. This photo was taken on a Sanibel Gulf-side beach at sunset, giving it a rosy pink glow.

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The Sandwich Tern is a powerful flier thanks to its long, slim wings. It’s a medium-size tern, about 15 inches long.

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Sandwich Terns are strictly coastal inhabitants, from North Carolina south, around the Gulf of Mexico, and to the coasts of South America. They are also found on many of the Caribbean Islands. This one looks like it is commanding the waters to part.

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This is an interesting photo of a Sandwich Tern landing but it also shows the yellow shafts of the first primary feather on each wing. The primaries are the long feathers at the ends of the wings. I’ve noticed this before on other photos of Sandwich Terns that I have taken. I can’t tell if the other primary feathers have yellow shafts because they are mostly covered by other feathers.

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Sandwich Terns have a wing span of 34 inches.

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Here’s a Sandwich Tern trying to land in a mixed group of other terns. It looks like they are so tightly packed that there is no room, but each bird that came in found a space where it could settle down.

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This bird is the same size and shape as the other Sandwich Terns but it has an all-yellow bill. I sent a photo to my friend John Murphy and he told me it was probably a South American subspecies of Sandwich Tern called a Cayenne Tern. Every once in a while, one of them makes it all the way up to Florida.

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