Twitching the Roseate Terns

Roseate Terns are considered pelagic, marine-oriented birds. And when breeding, they do so on coastal islands. Given this, as you can imagine, there are not easy to see, unless you go looking for them in the sea or on known breeding islands. So when we heard that a couple of them were being sighted on the sand bards near the coastal inlet in Pulicat Lake in Tamil Nadu, we definitely had to go twitching for them. There was also the added bonus of potentially seeing a Brown Noddy that was getting sighted intermittently in the same patch!

For this twitching trip, it was Albin and his family, Dhanapal sir and myself. So we went in Albin’s car. This time we started in the afternoon. The plan was to stay at a hotel roughly an hour away from the lake. We were to reach it sometime into the night, catch our sleep and then head off early to lake, with the aim to reach just before dawn break. Our local guide was going to be our regular, Mr. Yuvraj. And that is how pretty much how it went.

Once at the lake, we were soon sitting in Yuvraj’s boat, eager to see the main target birds. We started off with seeing a nice Slender-billed Gull not too far from the jetty.

And then our search began. This meant heading out to the mouth of the sea and then searching the various sand bars, each time keeping our fingers crossed. Finally it paid off. We saw a Roseate Tern in a flock of other terns on a sand bar. Here are some pictures of the individual:

The individual finally took off and decided to fly off to another sand bar at some distance. So we too headed off. This time we saw two Roseate Terns, again mixed with a flock of other Terns. Here are some more pictures: