In late May, a Sandwich Tern in Louisiana had an unusual experience. A pink monster trapped it and put metal and plastic bracelets on its lower legs. Undeterred and unaware that it was now part of a study of Sandwich Tern survivorship and breeding site fidelity, the tern completed its summer's task, raising a new Sandwich Tern. When the chick had fledged, the parents departed with the hungry fledgling in tow. Only they know the route they took to get to North Carolina, but on August 8 the banded adult and its fledgling were roosting on the south end of Wrightsville Beach with the local Black Skimmers where they were spotted by myself, Brianna Elliott, and Walker Golder. On the following day I found another banded Sandwich Tern, this time a fledgling.

We reported the bands and found out that the two Sandwich Terns, and others like them, were breeding at the Isles Dernieres Barrier Island Refuge is part of the Isles Dernieres-Timbalier Islands Important Bird Area, which supports migrating and nesting birds, including thousands of breeding Royal and Sandwich Terns. Through the Bird Banding Lab, the national clearinghouse for banded birds, we got in touch with the bander, Dr. Aaron Pierce of Nicholls State University in Louisiana, whose study the tern is a part of.

Royal and Sandwich Terns are known to disperse northward during the post-breeding period, prior to their departure for wintering grounds on the Gulf coast, the Caribbean, and Central and South America. However, this may be the first record of Sandwich Terns breeding along the Gulf coast moving to the Atlantic seaboard. Dr. Pierce found another North Carolina connection in his tern work. A Royal Tern breeding in the Dernieres Barrier Island Refuge was originally banded as a chick in 1986 on one of the dredge-spoil islands that the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission manages at Oregon Inlet.

Most people know birds fly south for the winter, but south is only one of four options they have to choose from, and the Royal and Sandwich Terns that take a tern to the east, west, or north may be looking for more abundant food sources. They feed primarily on baitfish, but also on shrimp and squid, and availability of food is a major factor affecting birds' migrations. The terns using local inlets--it's usual to count several hundred at each of our four survey inlets--will continue to be seen in staging flocks into November, when they will all finally head south, but until then, now we know that some of the dispersing Sandwich Terns we will be seeing could be from as close as the Cape Fear River or as far away as the northern Gulf.