ML130905591

Age

Not specified

Sex

Not specified

Observation details

Medium-sized terns with slender yellow-orange down-turned bills. Black caps to about middle of head with white foreheads. Mostly whitish overall, but with darker wingtips. We first spotted these birds from this location while scanning the bay. From a distance the ELTE's seemed right, but we also thought we were seeing Common Terns. To verify what we were seeing, we crossed the bay and viewed these birds again from the Empire Sewer Plant where we confirmed the ELTEs ... many were perched on pilings at the old Sitka Dock ... and also found that the possible Common Terns were actually Bonaparte Gulls. Still not being satisfied, we moved down to the Sitka Dock overlook across from the geodesic dome house at about (43.3681743,-124.2952869) where were able to reach our maximum count of 35 individual ELTEs. This stop ended the Cape Arago Audubon outing at about 1pm. However, two of us continued down to Pigeon Point where we found a dozen or more ELTEs on the sandbars and feeding frantically with more Bonapartes and many other gulls. That's where the following photos were taken.

Technical information

Model

NIKON D5100

ISO

100

Focal length

300 mm

Flash

Flash did not fire

f-stop

f/5.6

Shutter speed

1/500 sec

Dimensions

2464 pixels x 1632 pixels

Original file size

1.09 MB