Sooty Tern

Basic Description

The elegant, high-contrast Sooty Tern is a master of flight—a seabird that spends much of its life airborne above the waves. These agile, long-tailed terns nest in huge noisy colonies of up to one million pairs on remote islands in tropical and subtropical waters. Adults are charcoal black above and white below, with a white forehead; juveniles are dark overall with white markings on the wings and back. Sooty Terns take small fish and squid from the ocean surface but virtually never rest on the water.