Sooty tern

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The sooty tern (Onychoprion fuscatus) is a tern in the family Laridae. It is a seabird of the tropical oceans, and remarkably, has evolved the ability to fly for years at a time, skimming the sea surface for food, and returning to land only to breed, on islands throughout the equatorial zone.[1][2]

Taxonomy

The sooty tern was described by Carl Linnaeus in 1766 as Sterna fuscata, bearing this name for many years until the genus Sterna was split up; it is now classified in the genus Onychoprion as Onychoprion fuscatus.[3][4] The genus name is from ancient Greek Template:Transliteration, "claw" or "nail", and Template:Transliteration, "saw". The species name fuscatus is Latin for "dark".[5]

The sooty tern has little interspecific variation, but it is usually divided into six to eight allopatric subspecies. Some recent authors further subdivide the Indopacific population into up to eight subspecies altogether,Script error: No such module "Unsubst". but much of the variation is clinal. The affinities of eastern Pacific birds (including O. f. manutarus of Easter Island) are most strongly contested.Script error: No such module "Unsubst". Six subspecies are currently accepted by the IOC:[3]

Two additional subspecies have been suggested by other authors:[6]

  • Onychoprion fuscatus infuscatus (Lichtenstein, 1823) – Sunda Islands and vicinity (included in O. f. nubilosus by IOC[3]).
  • Onychoprion fuscatus kermadeci Mathews, 1916. – Kermadec Islands (included in O. f. serratus by IOC[3]).

Description

File:Lord Howe Island - Sooty Tern juvenile.JPG
Juvenile on Lord Howe Island; note the scaly appearance

It is a medium-large tern, similar in size to the Sandwich tern (Thalasseus sandvicensis) at Template:Convert long with an Template:Convert wingspan. The wings and tail are long, and it has black to dark blackish-brown upperparts and white underparts, and a white forehead. The tail is moderately deeply forked (more deeply forked than in Thalasseus terns, but less deeply than most Sterna terns), black, with white outer edges. It has black legs and bill.[6] The average life span is 32 years.[7] Juvenile sooty terns are grey-black above and below with narrow pale fringes on the upperpart feathers giving a scaly appearance above, and whitish on only the lower belly.[8]

The sooty tern is unlikely to be confused with any tern apart from the similarly dark-backed but smaller bridled tern (O. anaethetus). It is darker-backed than that species, and has a broader white forehead and no pale neck collar.

The call is a loud piercing 'wide-a-wake',[6] also cited as Template:Not a typo; it also has a harsh alarm call Template:Not a typo.[8]

Ecology

File:Sooty tern on nest.jpg
Adult O. f. nubilosus with egg in nest, Seychelles
File:Bird flocks Bird Island Seychelles.jpg
O. f. nubilosus at Bird Island, Seychelles, home to more than a million sooty terns at its peak

Sooty terns breed in colonies on rocky or coral islands.[9] It nests in a ground scrape or hole and lays a single egg, typically in the afternoon.[10] Although "two-egg clutches" have been reported, they probably occur when an egg from one nest rolls into another.[11] It feeds by picking fish from the surface in marine environments, often in large flocks, and rarely comes to land except to breed, and can stay out to sea for 3 to 10 years.[12] Due to the lack of oil in its feathers, it cannot float, and spends that entire time on the wing.[13]

This bird is migratory and dispersive, wintering more widely through the tropical oceans. It has very marine habits compared to most terns; sooty terns are generally found inland only after severe storms. The Field Museum, for example, has a male specimen which was found exhausted on August 2, 1933 on the slopes of Mount Cameroon above Buea, about Template:Convert ASL, after foul weather had hit the Gulf of Guinea.[14] This species is a rare vagrant to western Europe, although a bird was present at Cemlyn Bay, Wales for 11 days in July 2005.[15]

It is also not normally found on the Pacific coasts of the Americas due to its pelagic habits. At Baja California, where several nesting locations are offshore, it can be seen more frequently, whereas for example only two individuals have ever been recorded on the coast of El Salvador - one ring recovered in 1972, and a bird photographed on October 10, 2001 at Lake Olomega[16] which was probably blown there by a storm.[17] Hurricanes can also devastate small breeding colonies, as has been surmised for example for the sooty tern nesting sites on cays off the San Andrés Islands of Colombia.[18]

An exceptionally common bird, the sooty tern is not considered threatened by the IUCN.[19]

In culture

Colloquially, it is sometimes known as "wideawake" or "wideawake tern"; an onomatopoeic name derived from its call 'wide-a-wake',[6] as is the Hawaiian name ʻewa ʻewa which roughly means "cacophony".[20] In most of Polynesia its name is manutara or similar, literally "tern-bird",[21] though it might be better rendered in English as "the tern" or "common tern". This refers to the fact that wherever Polynesian seafarers went on their long voyages, they usually would find these birds in astounding numbers. It is also known as kaveka in the Marquesas Islands, where dishes using its eggs are a delicacy.[22]

On Easter Island, this species and the spectacled tern (O. lunatus) are collectively known as manutara. The manutara played an important role in the tangata manu ("birdman") ritual: whichever hopu (champion) could retrieve the first manutara egg from Motu Nui islet would become that year's tangata manu; his clan would receive prime access to resources, especially seabird eggs.

Gallery

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References

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Sources

  • Boulton, Rudyerd & Rand, A.L. (1952): A collection of birds from Mount Cameroon. Fieldiana Zoology 34 (5): 35–64. Fulltext at the Internet Archive
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  • Pukui, Mary Kawena; Elbert, Samuel Hoyt; Mookini, Esther T. & Nishizawa, Yu Mapuana (1992): New Pocket Hawaiian Dictionary with a Concise Grammars and Given Names in Hawaiian. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu. Template:ISBN
  • Streets, Thomas H. (1877): Some Account of the Natural History of the Fanning Group of Islands. Am. Nat. 11 (2): 65–72. First page image
  • Tregear, Edward (1891): Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary. Lyon and Blair, Wellington.

Further reading

  • Brown, William Yancey (1973). Breeding Biology of the Sooty Tern and Brown Noddy on Manana or Rabbit Island, Hawaii. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Hawaii.[1]
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  • Olsen, Klaus Malling & Larsson, Hans (1995): Terns of Europe and North America. Christopher Helm, London. Template:ISBN

External links

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  1. ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  2. ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  3. ↑ a b c d Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  4. ↑ Bridge et al. (2005)
  5. ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  6. ↑ a b c d Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  7. ↑ FWS
  8. ↑ a b Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  9. ↑ Streets (1877)
  10. ↑ Script error: No such module "Citation/CS1".
  11. ↑ Script error: No such module "Citation/CS1".
  12. ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  13. ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  14. ↑ Boulton & Rand (1952)
  15. ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  16. ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  17. ↑ Herrera et al. (2006)
  18. ↑ Estela et al. (2005)
  19. ↑ Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named iucn status 19 November 2021
  20. ↑ From ʻewa, "crooked, out of shape, imperfect" (Pukui et al. 1992: p.17)
  21. ↑ The Polynesian word for terns (tara) is the same as the word for "pointed"; it is easy to see how these sharp-billed fork-tailed birds came to be called thus (Tregear, 1891)
  22. ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
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