Black Tern, Stratford CT, August 2015

In New England Black Tern is easiest to find during summer at the marshes where it breeds in ME and northern VT.  However, it can be a pretty challenging bird to find elsewhere in New England.  Although a regular migrant in spring and fall mostly along the coasts, it comes through in pretty small numbers and in narrow windows of time.  And they don’t typically stick around so they aren’t very chaseable.  For instance I didn’t add Black Tern to my NH list until September 2011 when several passed by at sea while I was on a pelagic trip.   

The last New England state where I needed Black Tern was CT.  The story in CT was the same as the other coastal states – a regular migrant but typically not sticking around to chase.  And then there was the extra complication that even the closest coastal CT spot was a 2-hour drive away.  So I typically didn’t even give them a second thought when one was reported.  But then in early August quite a large flock of Sterna terns began congregating at the mouth of the Housatonic River between Milford Point and Stratford Point.  And for a couple days in a row a small number of Black Terns were seen in the flock.  Maybe these would finally be chaseable.  Or perhaps others would find their way to the flock attracted to the same conditions causing the Sterna terns to flock there.  So after receiving excellent advice and directions from Patrick Comins and Frank Mantlik who bird the area extensively, I was ready to give it a try. 

I arrived at Stratford Point at 8:30 the next morning at nearly full low tide.  Looking to the north there was a wide expanse of mudflats and literally thousands of Sterna terns – maybe 3,000 in total.  But they were very distant; many were more than ½ mile away (little more than specks using binoculars and still barely identifiable even using a scope).  Always up for a challenge, I started scanning through the flock hoping to pick out a smaller darker one that could be a Black Tern.  But after numerous scans I could only find Common Terns, with a number of shorebirds mixed in.  I was now getting pretty disappointed and decided to pan out over the Sound to see what I might find flying by a bit closer.  And almost as soon as I did I picked out a flock of 4 Black Terns flying quickly out of the mouth of the Housatonic to open waters, as if they were leaving the area.  Success! 

With such a large flock of terns, I was hoping for some other rarities as well.  After all, as they say – “one good tern deserves another”.  But despite another hour plus of scanning I saw nothing new except for a couple Roseates.  And twice I picked out a single Black Tern sitting in the flock on the sand bars.  Here is a very distant phonescoped photo of one of the Blacks.

Black Tern was #319 for me in CT, and the 237th species I have seen in each of the 6 New England states.  I’ve now seen this species in 42 states, only missing it in several Midwestern states and in the Pacific Northwest (see my statebird map below).