BirdUp · Species
Arctic Tern
Sterna paradisaeaPontoppidan, 1763
- Commonness
- Very common
- Best seen
- Year-round
01 · Identification
How to tell it apart
The Arctic tern is a tern in the family Laridae. This bird has a circumpolar breeding distribution covering the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions of Europe, Asia, and North America. The species is strongly migratory, seeing two summers each year as it migrates along a convoluted route from its northern breeding grounds to the Antarctic coast for the southern summer and back again about six months later. Recent studies have shown average annual round-trip lengths of about 70,900 km (38,300 nmi) for birds nesting in Iceland and Greenland, and about 48,700 km (26,300 nmi) for birds nesting in the Netherlands, while an individual from the Farne Islands in Northumberland with a light level geolocator tag covered a staggering 96,000 km (52,000 nmi) in ten months from the end of one breeding season to the start of the next. These are by far the longest migrations known in the animal kingdom.
Description · wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
02 · Where
Where to find it
- Breeding range
- PAL, NA : widespread Arctic and subarctic coasts and inland, from Greenland, Iceland and British Isles to north-east Siberia, Sakhalin and Kamchatka (east Russia), Aleutian Is., Alaska mainland through Arctic and subarctic Canada to James Bay, south-east Canada and New York
- Non-breeding range
- Subantarctic and oceans and Antarctic Ocean to edge of pack-ice
03 · When
When to look
Months this species is recorded across its Australian range.
- Jan
- Feb
- Mar
- Apr
- May
- Jun
- Jul
- Aug
- Sep
- Oct
- Nov
- Dec
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