A flock of Elegant Terns roosts at Garibaldi amid warm coastal water
September 16, 2026
A flock of eleven was resting at the Garibaldi Marina on Tillamook Bay on September 11. This is a bird of the Gulf of California and the Southern California coast. More than nine in ten of them nest on a single island, Isla Rasa, in the Gulf of California, and only five nesting colonies remain in the world. Another was photographed in Tillamook County in late April, so the species turns up on this coast in more than one season.Picking one out from the that also work this bay is mostly a matter of the bill. An Elegant Tern is a slim, crow-sized tern with a long, thin orange bill that droops slightly toward the tip. A Caspian Tern is a much heavier bird with a thick, deep red bill, and in flight its outer wing feathers are mostly black from below where the Elegant Tern's are pale with dark tips. Royal Tern, scarce this far north, also has an orange bill, but a stouter one, and a short bushy crest that stops behind the eye with white between the two. The Elegant Tern's crest is longer and shaggier; it starts above the eye, wraps around it and runs down the nape. In September the adults show a white forehead rather than the full black cap of the breeding season, and young birds are grayer above with a gray crown and more mottling. Common and Forster's Terns are smaller still, with slighter bills, and neither carries the shaggy nape.The tern makes its living on small schooling fish, above all, along with sardine, topsmelt and jack mackerel. It hunts by fluttering over the water on long pale wings and plunging headfirst to seize a fish in the bill, usually within ten miles of shore and often within sight of it. How many chicks a colony raises in a given year tracks the anchovy closely. The bird goes where the fish are.That is what brings it to Oregon. After the breeding season ends, Elegant Terns spread up and down the coast following anchovy schools, and most turn back south by October. In an ordinary year the northward push stops in northern California. In warm-water years it reaches Oregon, Washington and sometimes British Columbia, and Oregon's fish and wildlife department lists the species as a regular post-breeding visitor to this coast, roosting with gulls on spits, sandbars and mudflats near bay mouths, which is exactly the setting at Garibaldi.The water off this coast is warm this year. Buoys off Tillamook and at Astoria Canyon read 59 to 61 degrees in early September, against a mid-September norm near 55 degrees for this stretch of coast, inside a marine heatwave that has covered the California Current through the summer. NOAA reporting this year has anchovies and sardines shifting north with the warm water.
