Adorable Terns, from Ice Swimmer. Click for full size.
© Ice Swimmer, all rights reserved.
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Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
Adorable Terns, from Ice Swimmer. Click for full size.
© Ice Swimmer, all rights reserved.
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I love their black caps with their bright red beaks and feet! They’re very elegantly dressed.
Elegant and tasteful, indeed.
Thank You!
Terns are my favourite gulls. They are dive-fishers, about the same size as a thrush or a grackle. Their fishing activities are fun to follow, they spot a fish, hover, dive, ascend steeply and do swooping curves in the air.
Not sure if these are common terns or arctic terns (who migrate humongous distances, hitting both Arctic and Antarctic summer and migrating rest of the time on lower latitudes). The cute pair on the wooden pier are from Töölönlahti (Töölö bay) and the pier belongs to a summer café and a SUP board rental facility. The pair had a nest there at some point. The seawall is in between Olympiaterminaali (a ship terminal for car ferries to Åland and Sweden) and the park Kaivopuisto. On the other side of the street (Ehrenströmintie) is the area where a lot of foreign embassies are located, including the U.S. Embassy (a.k.a. Fortress America, my back was turned towards it when I was photographing).
They seem to have some serious frontier psychology when building embassies overseas, it’s the same over here.
In Latvian the tern is called zīriņš, and they’re known for their ability to gather in large groups and shit all over everything (most notoriously, the press building by the river). I love them.
One of the places with bad vibes in Helsinki is the street between U.K. and U.S. Embassies. It’s gloomy and threatening. Rest of the street is remarkably different, even though there are many other embassies as well.
They’re tiira in Finnish. Common tern would be kalatiira (fish tern) and arctic tern lapintiira (Lapland tern).