“Is that a live Bridled Tern on your head, or are you just doing a performance piece about the 19th century millinery trade’s impact on bird populations?” is currently a legitimate, if loquacious, way to greet birdwatchers at Scituate Harbor. Because one of the most exciting rare birds of the summer, a species that has also been seen here on the Cape as well as various points around the Gulf of Maine, is either oddly friendly, a little loopy, or really bad at attacking things.
Let me explain. First, the millinery trade was a multibillion-dollar industry around killing birds to put them and their feathers on hats. The Audubon societies were formed to put an end to this. Second, the Bridled Tern is a rare, pan-tropical seabird that we would typically only see after hurricanes, though they have shown up occasionally absent any strong winds. The closest they breed in the Bahamas, and the closest US population is a few that breed around the Florida Keys, especially in a mixed tropical seabird colony on the Dry Tortugas off Key West. So to see one here in Massachusetts is highly unlikely. To see one every day, all summer long, playing with dogs and perching on people’s heads is, well, something a lot less likely than “highly unlikely”.
But that is exactly what’s been happening for a few weeks now up in Scituate - that’s a faraway place almost all the way to Boston from here. On July 10, young Scituate birder and biologist Liam Norton saw a big, dark-backed tern with a white forehead at Scituate Harbor. The way the word got out sounded like an April Fool’s joke. Someone posted that Liam had just found a Bridled Tern, and that it was “currently sitting on a beach umbrella near the lighthouse”, complete with a photo that seemed like it had to be AI generated – indeed, this ultra rare bird that would have birders speeding to Scituate posthaste, was blithely relaxing on the top of a colorful beach umbrella with oblivious beachgoers underneath.
It got weirder. Since then, the tern has shown a real affinity for perching on all kinds of things, like it has some sort of dangerous perch fetish. Cars. Deck railings. The heads of many different people. Plus a rottweiler, which it reportedly befriended, and at least one golden retriever. That’s right, the tern seems to make friends with dogs, sometimes poking them and flying off, sometimes perching on their heads. I haven’t made it up there yet but the photos I’ve seen are adorable. Someone found a report from North Carolina of a Bridled Tern perching on their aunt’s head and playing with their dog back in late June, adding “I swear the photos are real lol” – surely this is that same bird.
At least one, non-dog-befriending or head-perching Bridled Tern has been bopping around the coast of New Hampshire and Maine since 2024, but that bird is still up there, not landing on people as far as I know. We’ve had a couple of Cape reports of Bridled Terns in the last month, including a fleeting report from Race Point in Provincetown back on June 22, and then a storm driven bird at First Encounter Beach on July 8. That was likely the Maine bird, as it didn’t perch on anyone and was absent from Maine during that storm, returning on the 10th.
I did a deep dive, pun obviously intended, on Bridled Terns to figure out why the Scituate bird is behaving this way. Other than their well-known habit of perching on random flotsam out at sea, including coconuts, pieces of wood, Styrofoam, and even sunning sea turtles, I turned up nothing in the behavior literature. Their nest defense is like our local Least Terns- they dive but don’t strike human intruders, preferring to poop bomb them. So this bird is one of a kind. Some of us wonder if it was in captivity at some point.
My theory? Somewhere, on a desert isle, a marooned sailor and his rottweiler, Flotsam, are wondering where their best friend, the little tern they reared from chick-hood, has gone to. What they don’t know is that the tern has set off to find them help, but no matter how many heads he lands on, no one seems to understand. At least that’s the premise of the screenplay I’m working on.
