By Peter Vankevich
It was early Thursday, Sept. 25, at Cape Point on Hatteras Island. As Bob Lewis focused his long lens on a Black Tern, he noticed in the frame an unusual bird, what he initially thought was a “Sandwich Tern with a yellowish bill.”
That description would make it a Cayenne Tern, one of three subspecies of the Sandwich Tern and which is found from the southern Caribbean southward along the Atlantic coast of South America. In North Carolina, Cabot’s Tern is the common subspecies.
“The more photos I took the more I suspected it was an Elegant Tern rather than a “Cayenne Tern,” he told me. “I have seen them before in California, a long time ago.”
Word spread among the local birding community of a rare bird. Jeff Lewis of Southern Shores posted: “An Elegant Tern (a West Coast species) of tern was discovered on Hatteras Island at Cape Point on September 25 by Bob Lewis. A friend and I drove down there yesterday morning, joined others that were already on the beach and relocated it.”
The bird was present for three days but it wasn’t always easy to see. Matt Janson who lives on Ocracoke Island and Larry Chen in Nags Head, two top notch observers, saw it for two of those days, but on one of those days, it took them four hours to locate the bird.
Why this was an extraordinary sighting is because this is a bird of the eastern Pacific coast that rarely strays to the Atlantic Coast. Only four other states have at least one record.
The Elegant Tern world population is estimated to be approximately 200,000 individuals, but they are vulnerable due to disease and predation because only five nesting colonies remain in southern California and western Mexico.
About 90% of the population breeds on the uninhabited Isla Rasa in the Gulf of California east of the Baja California Peninsula.
These birds migrate south to Peru, Ecuador and Chile for the northern winter.
Elegant Terns (Thalasseus elegans) look similar to Royal Terns, which are common on the Outer Banks from spring into late fall.
An important field mark is that the Elegant Tern has a longer slender orange-red bill and also is smaller.
According to Harry LeGrand, author of the “Birds of North Carolina” website which offers detailed accounts of bird species, including their distribution, abundance and occurrence across different regions of the state, this is only the second record of an Elegant Tern for North Carolina.
The first was observed at the northern end of Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge on Sept. 14, 2023, and photographed by Daniel Irons, the sole person to observe it.
The Elegant Tern present here for three days, Sept. 25 to 27, allowed many birders to see and photograph it. For Jeff Lewis, it was his 414th bird species in Dare County. He added another, Kirtland’s Warbler, soon after.
How long this Elegant Tern had been in the Outer Banks prior to Sept. 25 and where it went after those three days is anyone guess.
It was not surprising that Bob Lewis discovered it. Mathematics Professor Emeritus at Fordham University, he now lives in Durham, has made countless trips to the Outer Banks over the last 50 years and has made significant contributions to the knowledge of the birds of the Outer Banks.
He has posted photographs of about 30 rare birds in the online Carolina Bird Club Bird Photo Gallery and has published several papers in “The Chat,” the club’s quarterly bulletin.
“I have absolutely no clue how a Pacific Coast species — it breeds only there — got here, any more than I can explain how the Pacific Coast only Heermann’s Gull gets/got here,” LeGrand said. “We know how the American Flamingoes got to N.C. and the East a few years ago — a hurricane went through the Yucatan/Cuba region and pushed them to the U.S. With Pacific Coast strays, no clue.”
