a new tern

A new bird came flying up the creek yesterday afternoon. It was on the Pine Neck side and I didn't have my spotting scope set up but I could see that it was bigger than a Common Tern, not as big as a Royal Tern and had a distinctive look: pale above with dark primary tips, the usual tern black cap and a not so-usual black bill; the classic tern forked tail was proportionally shorter than it appears on the more common terns. Also it had a distinctive mode of flight, rather strong and stiff. My first thought was that it was a Sandwich Tern (the black wing tips seemed to support that but I was too far away to get a good look at the shape of the bill and any color details). On reflection, it occurs to me that the default tern of this size in our area is Gull-billed Tern; the heavy-bodied, front-loaded, short-tailed look of this bird and its strong, heavy mode of flight also point in this direction. I don't see either of these birds very often and either one would be a first for this locality but the Gull-billed is easily the stronger candidate. Unlike the Sandwich Tern, (which is more of a stray on Long Island), Gull-billed is at the northern edge of its range out here, breeding in small numbers on the South Shore west of us. Like some other southern birds of this habitat (Forster's Tern, Boat-tailed Grackle), it may be expanding to the northeast. That means Eastern Long Island.

We're so used to seeing Osprey nowadays but sometimes they warrant a second look. An Osprey soaring on the creek this afternoon turned out to be carrying a fish but, instead of taking it to a nest, he was circling and calling. It didn't take long for him to be joined by a second Osprey and the whole affair started to look like incipient courtship. Then a third Osprey appear, seeming to chase the others away and the two 'courting' birds moved further up the creek while the odd Osprey out returned to the Pine Neck nest. Now the Osprey with the fish began a series of aerial maneuvers that certainly looked to me like display. But suddenly, there were two more Ospreys soaring with the original two over the middle of the creek. All four birds seemed to catch an updraft and they were circling higher and higher before they started peeling off and disappearing. One of them came right over my head, heading out to the western part of Shinnecock. Another one, perhaps the one with the fish, disappeared over the Pine Neck tree line and I never saw what happened to other two. There were five different birds involved in the affair and at least one of them came from the Pine Neck nesting couple. I thought, although I am not completely sure, that they were all adult birds but I suppose there is the possibility that they were young birds from a nearby nest learning from their elders how to fly; they all certainly had the soaring principle down pat and the bird with the fish was a first-rate show-off. Frankly the whole sequence has me mystified.

In yesterday's list of active local 'large flycatchers' (Eastern Kingbird, Great Crested Flycatcher, Eastern Wood-Pewee) I omitted a fourth member of the tribe. Eastern Phoebe belongs with the other big guys; it is, in fact, bigger than the Pewee.

Eric Salzman