Tern and Dolphins

I know I said this blog was to be about things other than birds, but occasionally an excellent bird comes along and gets a guernsey.  Especially when there are other things to include!

I commented a few days ago about a White-fronted Tern which terned (sic) into a Little Tern.  The link there includes a couple of maps illustrating the migration of the White-fronted Tern from NZ to Australia.

Today there was an early alert about a Common Tern at Betka Beach.  However that terned out to be ....... an immature White-fronted Tern.  Amusingly one of the key field marks is that a Common Tern has more white on the front of its head  (or to put it another way, the White-fronted has more black in that area).  Here are a few photos.

This first one mainly gives an idea of the bird's size relative to Silver Gulls and a Crested Tern.

 In this one, the black scalloping on the bird's back (another strong field mark) is just hinted at,

 The scalloping is perhaps a bit more visible here.

 A nice close up.

 I ten went down to Quarry Beach.  Just as I was about to leave a pod of about 6 Bottle-nosed Dolhins appeared.  They were doing the whole athletic bit: surfing down waves and jumping completely clear of the waves.  It is pretty much impossible to tell where they were going to appear along a 200m stretch of surf so I just pointed the camera and pressed the button where I last saw them.  This snap is not too bad!

 This was my second best shot: one fin and the suggestion of a shape surfing!

 Imagine how bad the other photos were!

As a result of comments on Facebook by Dan Ashdown and Janine Duffy I now know these to be Indo-Pacific Bottlenosed Dolphins Tursiops aduncus. See this site for a field guide.

We were standing on a rock to get snaps and I thought these shells and green kelp were interesting.  They were about 1 metre above the current water level which needs a bit of thought as most of the tides are not that high.