Most of my water birding has been done on the Texas coast and I've been up
here for a year. We live in Elliott Bay Marina. I started keeping a
marina area list as soon as I arrived, and last year there wasn't a single
tern on it. In fact, we didn't see any this year until the past few weeks.
Now we're having regular flybys by about a half dozen large terns that I
would call Caspian from their size and overall appearance, but the bills
are nowhere near what I would call red or even orange. In Texas they are
*always* a deep orangy red or actually, as described in the books, "blood
red". I would describe these more as yellow. Just yellow. Could they
really be Caspian? They have a clear, high-pitched two-part whistle. The
books say common tern should be coming through in numbers right now, but
they seem far too big for common, and they have the Caspian's clearly
defined black wing tips. Those silly pale bills are just throwing me off.

Please reply direct. chapman at fanfarehouse.com Thanks.

Mary Ann