Common Tern, Ashley River mouth

[Michael Szabo]

Great photos Andrew, thanks for posting them. Looks like they'll have to revise the Australian Bird Guide because the text doesn't mention leg colour and the plate shows only black legs or dark reddish legs rather than the bright red legs your photos show here.

[andrewcrossland]

Unless of course …….. haha (as an afterthought) …. I photographed European common terns over in Sumatra and didn’t realise it?! They’d have felt right at home amongst the thousands of Common Redshank, Eurasian Curlew, Grey Herions, Purple Herons and Great Tits!!

[paradoxdinokipi]

You mean Cinereous Tit?

[andrewcrossland]

Yes, but until not too long ago they were just Great Tit in local field guides and it seemed so odd to see them!

[Michael Szabo]

Hopefully we'll get more answers when the movements of all these tern species are one day tracked over longer distances.

[andrewcrossland]

Here's another Common tern from Sumatra with red legs (sent by a colleague over there)

Nchay tern 2.jpg (46.57 KiB) Viewed 759 times

[Davidthomas]

The bird was present there today, appeared to have slightly? red legs but certainly not super obvious compared with Peters original photos. That is assuming it was the same bird as previously reported.

A nice canterbury tick for me after trying to find one there for quite a while!

[AngryBird45]

Apparently a Grey Duck was there too??

[Davidthomas]

Yep. There was a phenotypically grey looking grey duck feeding on the estuary too.

Plus the black stilt is around

[NoahF]

No Common tern seen by our group today after carefully searching through a White-fronted tern flock on the sandbar.