Elegant Terns arrive on Tillamook Bay, riding the anchovy run north

September 11, 2026Coastal Lowlands

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are on Tillamook Bay this week.¹ Twenty-nine were counted on the bay on September 6, and observers have kept reporting them in the days since.¹ For a bird that nests almost entirely on one small island in the Gulf of California, the northern Oregon coast is a long way from home, and September is exactly when the species gets here.

The Elegant Tern (Thalasseus elegans) is the smallest of the three crested, orange-billed terns that show up on this coast, and the easiest way to pick one out is to stand it next to the others. Caspian Terns, the big ones that have been rasping over the bay all summer, carry a heavy blood-orange bill and show mostly dark undersides to the outer wing. Royal Terns sit in between in size and bill weight. An Elegant Tern is slim and long-winged, with a thin yellow-orange bill that droops a little at the tip, a shaggy black crest that by fall has pulled back to leave the forehead white, a deeply forked tail, and pale underwings tipped in black. On a tideflat the Elegants tend to stand in their own tight knot a short distance from the Caspians rather than mixing in. In the air they flutter on narrow wings and drop straight into the water after small fish.

Those fish explain the whole story. Elegant Terns feed heavily on northern anchovy, and once the breeding season ends on Isla Rasa the birds scatter along the coast in both directions, following the schools. Each autumn a pulse of anchovy moves north up the California Current, and Brown Pelicans, Heermann's Gulls and Elegant Terns ride along behind it. How far north the terns push varies from year to year with where the fish are. Their movement tracks anchovy availability, which itself shifts with ocean conditions off Baja California. and are on the bay this same week, the same company the terns keep down south.¹ Elegant Terns remain an uncommon enough visitor here that the reports were flagged when they came in.

The place to look is the sandbars and tideflats at low tide, where the flock loafs between feeding runs, and the channels and nearshore surf where single birds hover and plunge. A slender, drooping bill and a nearly white underwing are the two marks that settle it.

1. eBird
2. iNaturalist

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