Mystery bird: Inca tern, Larosterna inca

This mystery bird comes with a bit of a twist: If you woke up on a beach and saw this bird, where in the world would you be? (includes video)

Inca tern, Larosterna inca (protonym, Sterna Inca), photographed at Bristol Zoo, England.

Image: Adrian Pingstone, September 2005 (public domain) [velociraptorize].

Question: This mystery bird comes with a bit of a twist: Instead of me telling you where this bird was photographed, you tell me! If you had been caught in a terrible storm before being shipwrecked, and then, whilst sitting on the beach, you spied this bird, where in the world would you be?

Response: This lovely seabird is a captive Inca tern, Larosterna inca, the only member of its genus. This bird is another species that I think of as a "flying fieldmark" because there is nothing else in the world that looks quite like it.

This species' range is restricted to the Humboldt Current, which is a cold, low-salinity oceanic current that flows north from the southern tip of Chile to northern Peru (South America). This is the largest ocean upwelling in the world, and it forms the basis for the world's richest and most productive marine ecosystem.

It is here where the Inca tern is found; nesting in hollows or burrows along the coasts of Peru and Chile and feeding primarily on small fish, particularly anchovies. If you saw this bird after being shipwrecked, you would know that you are somewhere on the western coast of South America.

Here's a video of a couple wild Inca terns at Pucusana near Lima, Peru, filmed on on 20 April 2011:




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