Sleek, showy and well-dressed, royal terns are a common sight along the Jersey Cape during the warmer months, generally May through October. Their loud, rolling and ringing calls can be heard above the roar of the surf and the sound of the wind, often described as “Ker-rrrick!” Listen to a few examples of their sounds online, and you’ll probably recognize it the next time you go to the beach.
With its black cap and shaggy crest, steel-gray back and upper wings, gleaming white breast and belly, lightly forked tail, and an orange and almost dagger-like bill, royal terns are a charismatic member of the pantropical crested terns group. New Jersey is at the northern edge of the species’ breeding range. The oldest known individuals have lived about 27-28 years. Adults are monogamous, though it is unknown if the pair bond lasts for multiple years.
Royal terns feed by plunge-diving from 15 to 30 feet into the water’s surface to capture a wide variety of small fish species, which makes up most of their diet. Their dives can go three to five feet deep into the water column. They are truly denizens of the beach, patrolling the shoreline just past the breakers or roosting and resting on the sands. Occasionally venturing up inlets and into the back bays, royals rarely stray from salt water.
In the U.S., royal terns breed in coastal locations from New Jersey south to Florida, along the Gulf Coast, and in extreme southern California. In New Jersey the only nesting location currently is at Horseshoe Island (mouth of Little Egg Harbor Inlet).
Horseshoe Island is now an annual location for staging royal terns as well. Hundreds of birds nest there and are augmented in late summer and early fall by other royal terns that gather there before heading south for the winter months. Counts of almost 2,000 birds have been recorded at this important site for beach-nesting birds. Horseshoe Island is also critically important for nesting/feeding American oystercatchers, piping plovers, least terns and common terns.
If you look closely at a flock of royal terns along the beaches, you may notice a silver U.S. Fish & Wildlife band or more colorful flag-like leg bands at the base of a bird’s leg. Digital photography allows us to record and submit those numbers (picture a small colored flag with a short combination of letters and numbers, readable through pictures or good optics) to scientists and wildlife biologists, revealing that some of the royal terns seen here in late summer and fall originate from a massive colony on a human-made island in southern Chesapeake Bay near Hampton Roads, Virginia.
This is a good example of the value of citizen science and contributes to our understanding of seasonal movements of birds. When a new construction project threatened the tern colony there, a successful plan was executed where the birds were lured to a nearby island, where the colony persists. But that’s another story.
The royal tern is, perhaps appropriately given its name, the king of courtship among the crested tern species. In addition to sweeping tandem aerial displays, ground courtship begins with the male arriving with a fish in its bill, often calling. He presents his offering of a recently captured item to the female.
If she’s receptive she’ll consume it, and the pair will often preen each other, waddle around with wings cocked down at a 90-degree angle while calling vociferously, and raise crests before flying off for mating, which usually occurs away from the actual nest site.
After nesting, many royal terns do a “post-breeding dispersal,” traveling farther north to take advantage of different or better food resources up the coast. Juvenile royal terns stay with their parents during this phase, sometimes remaining with the adults through their first winter. You can often see the young bird (now the same size as the adult but with browner/blacker upper wings and a yellowish bill) trailing the adult, hoping to gobble down the fish its parent just captured.
Listen for their “Please feed me!” call, which sounds like a short, high-pitched whistle. This same post-breeding phenomenon applies to brown pelicans (which can also be surprisingly frequent along the Jersey Shore from Cape May to Barnegat Inlet in late summer and fall).
Look for royal terns anywhere along the Jersey Coast this month. Good places include almost any beach, especially ones without many people, sand bars and tidal flats. They often hang out on the periphery of loafing gull flocks. In Cape May County, try Corson’s Inlet State Park, Avalon and Stone Harbor, the two-mile beach unit of Cape May National Wildlife Refuge and Cape Island’s beaches. Most will depart our area for warmer climes by early November.
Cape May Naturally is a birding and nature column written for the Herald by a rotating cast of experts at New Jersey Audubon. Audubon hosts birding events, tours and expeditions all year long. Find out more at njaudubon.org.
