BLACK SKIMMER

ONLY A SMALL WOODEN FENCE separated me from the wetland and birds at Albany Bulb—a former garbage dump on the east side of San Francisco Bay that has been artfully made into a shoreline park. That January morning, the tide was headed out, but a pageant of birds was still feeding from shallows and mud—little sandpipers, pintail ducks and green teals, whimbrels and avocets. Just thirty feet away, I spotted this striking congregation of six birds with oddly shaped orange and black beaks. “They must be a kind of tern,” I said out loud. “They look to be black skimmers,” offered a woman who happened to be standing next to me. Our being near Berkeley, it turned out of course that she had a graduate degree in integrative biology and worked for a nearby nature preserve. She explained that they are called skimmers because they fly inches above the water and scoop up fish with their lower bill, which is longer than the upper one. As she was talking, the skimmers took off and I was able to fire off a few shots before they were out of range. A little over a month later, I was back in Washington and the Covid lockdown began.

The largest congregations of skimmers live in South America, but there are small colonies in Florida and California. Their population has declined by an estimated 87 percent since 1966 and they are considered a species of high concern. Skimmers are indeed in the family of terns; one of their collective nouns is a “cotillion” of terns.

Nikon D500, 500mm, 1/640 sec @ f11, ISO 220

GOOD NEWS! I’ve just learned the second edition of Aves will be shipped next month. And I’m offering a ten percent “Early Bird” discount on pre-orders. Black Skimmers is among the over fifty photographs in the book.

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