Bridled Tern, August 7th/8th 2023

There’s something about terns that I just like.  The shape, the flight, the colours.  The surprising range of habitats they’re seen in.  The way they fill a summer that sometimes seems empty of birds with something elegant and interesting.  I’ve been lucky, since I came back to birding in the 2020 lockdowns, to see some incredible terns; Elegant in 2021 at Ainsdale Sands; a pair of Caspian at Idle Washes in Nottinghamshire in 2022; and a Gull-billed at Burtonmere earlier this year.  The tern of terns for me (aside from Inca…) though has always been the Bridled tern.  Reports of one on the weekend of the 5th/6th August 2023 at Afon Wen in north Wales had me scrambling to see if I could juggle family commitments and birthdays and after some urgent calling in of favours I set off with Kris at 3.30pm on Monday 7th August on the two and a half hour drive in glorious sunshine, with reports on BirdGuides showing the Bridled in and out of the bay more often than the hokey-cokey.  

We arrived full of hope, to negative news: why has the bird always left 10 minutes before any given birder arrives?  An unspoken karmic contract seems to exist between individual birds and optimistic birders: heaven knows what I must have done in a previous life because the bird I want to see is never just sitting there posing for me.  

We walked the cliffs, admiring the view, checking through every flock of terns for next three hours until the light began to go and then set off home, disappointed - but not as much as when a stop for food and check of BirdGuides showed the tern had come into roost 15 minutes after we left.  C’est la vie, as they say.

The following day, Bridled Tern was reported early but I had to take my son for a dentist appointment.  Cursing but resigning myself to a late arrival, I set off to arrive to the same news that the bird had left 20 minutes before I arrived.  I set up my scope (behind a group of blokes who were all 6 foot plus, of course) and waited with the large crowd.  As has become the norm, Nas and Mo became a lucky charm for me - as soon as we started to chat the shout went up and the Bridled Tern flashed past and settled on rocks less than 200 metres out.  Filming through the crook of an elbow of the men in front, I watched that beautiful, smoky-plumaged tern fly, preen, and see off the local Common Terns for half an hour before an idiot with a drone flushed the whole flock.

What a bird!  What a beauty!  In flight, like a silhouette made solid, and arrowing past with grace and speed, the Bridled Tern gave me unbridled joy.