I find Sterna Terns hard to ID. I found such a tern at Prineville Reservoir on Aug 15. I was able to get some very lousy digiscope photos of the bird from 200 yards. The bird did fly after a few minutes but it took me some time to relocate it since I was digiscoping when it flew. I didn't pick it up again until it was very far away. The wing pattern seemed to eliminate Arctic tern as I'm pretty sure the secondaries showed some darkness and the primaries had a good amount of darkness. I'm leaning toward juvenile Common Tern for the following reasons but I could easily be convinced otherwise:
There seems to be a good carpal bar present in this bird The hood seems too extensive for Forster'sI would like to hear opinions. You can view some very distant pics at https://app.box.com/s/4wiaqtuf6txjvfj2fiey
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