Black Tern

About the Black Tern

The Black Tern is a small, dark marsh tern unlike any other Texas tern - in breeding plumage the head and body are jet black set against silver-gray wings, a combination no other North American tern shows. Fall birds and youngsters are patchy gray and white with a dark smudge behind the eye and a dark shoulder bar.

Black Terns do not plunge-dive like their coastal cousins. They feed in light, buoyant, almost nighthawk-like flight, dipping to the surface for insects and small fish and hawking dragonflies in midair. They nest on floating mats of vegetation in prairie marshes far to the north.

In Texas the Black Tern is a migrant, moving through in May and again from July into September, when flocks - sometimes hundreds strong - drift along the coast and over bays, with smaller numbers crossing inland reservoirs.