Terns at Bear River Migratory Wildlife Refuge

I guess I didn’t realize how many birds I saw at Bear River Migratory Wildlife Refuge until I started posting about my visit. I was amazed at the number of species nesting on the refuge, birds I only see in the winter or during migration. In retrospect, it’s an even more remarkable place than I thought it was the two days I was there — and I already thought it was very special.

I see Common Terns in many places and I’m always trying to capture shots of them in flight,

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especially hovering just before diving.

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What I’ve never seen before, though, is them constructing nests. I’m sure I was anthropomorphizing while watching these two Common Terns building a nesting site, particularly since we just spent a week having our house repainted. However, it really seemed to me that this (female?) tern was berating her mate about how slowly the nest-building was going.

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Eventually, the mate showed up with a rather large stick in its beak

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and spent an inordinate amount of time deciding exactly where to place that stick — so I’m assuming it wasn’t just a pile of sticks, that at least one of them had some sort of “plan” as to what this nest should look like — I suspect it was the female.

Once again, I really wish I’d had another week or two to see how this nest proceeded. I’m going to have to coördinate my trip to Colorado next year so that I can stop before and after my trip to have a better chance of seeing the birds while their nesting.

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