Soaring, sailing across the cloudless blue. Knifing through orographic vapor like a jet fighter. This little bird crosses the world from ice cap to ice cap every year. It is perhaps the world’s greatest traveler. It spends most of it’s time living out at sea, drifting on shattered splinters of glacial ice, or simply bobbing on the frigid surface with no land in sight. It spends northern summers in the artic only to leave and fly all the way to the Antarctic when the seasons shift. It’s a journey of 12,000 miles. In fact, each year this graceful, speedy bird will fly more than 40,000 miles. For a bird that lives 30 years, this means it will fly the distance of the Earth to the moon and back three times over. No other animal, not even the monarch butterfly or humpback whale engages in such a journey.
This is the artic tern…
Knowing all this, it’s a privilege to have these little wanderers pitstop in a brackish pond just down the hill from my house every spring to nest and rear their young.
The slender body of the arctic tern moves through the air with its distinct chest-pumping wingbeat. It hovers in the ocean breeze until it spots a small fish or crustacean, then it plunges into the water to grab its prey. The arctic tern nests on barren islands and coastal tundra where it defends its eggs and babies with vigor, diving down and shrieking at perceived predators. It’s young live under the wings of father and mother for three to four weeks before first flight. Father and mother watch over and teach them for another month or two before they too embark on their vagabond life in the sky. These small, rather innocuous birds, are incredible.
In this video I bring my family down to a brackish pond to a tern nesting site to take do some birding, take bird photography, and while there I might as well turn my camera towards the mountains and ocean for some landscape photography, timelapse photography, long exposure photography and more.
Enjoy!
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