Royal Tern – Fisherrow Sands, Musselburgh, East Lothian, 9^th August 1999

Soon after Chris Hirst had been up for a weekend towards the end of July 1999, Steve Bailey ‘phoned to suggest he and Karen and Thomas and James would be in Edinburgh on Monday 9th August. We made plans to meet up for the day....... .

By now twitching and even birding seemed to have become a distant memory, displaced by work and our daughter Ellen, and replaced by the wildlife around about Carlowrie Cottages and the pond in particular, and latterly by an interest in propelling my Scottish list towards 300. So I certainly didn’t foresee any clash of interests. I had not had a tick since October 1997, and had at times begun to doubt that I would ever get a tick again (and at times I had tried to convince myself that I wasn’t really too bothered by this.....). However, during summer 1999 there were some signs of a recovery in the standard of birding with some good birds being available including my second Greater Sand Plover and second Broad-billed Sandpiper and third Lesser Yellowlegs. Better still I had a good run of local finds, recording a Black Darter, as well as other good Odonata on the pond, and a Hobby at Vane Farm.

Things were looking up. But I still couldn’t see where my next tick was coming from, and certainly I didn’t expect it to come in greater Edinburgh on a Monday evening in early August. Even then it was touch and go. But I connected and scored heavily, and in doing so rediscovered my twitching desire which had been latent for so long....... .

Steve and Karen, Thomas and James and Gillian and Ellen and I had travelled in two cars to Dalmeny station for the 14:18 train into Edinburgh Waverley. Once in Edinburgh we had wandered around taking in all the sights of the Edinburgh Festival.

Now, for much of the time we had been in Edinburgh I had been aware that there had been a Lesser Crested Tern at Thorntonloch in East Lothian which was mildly annoying as this would have been a very nice addition to my Scottish list.

However..... .

At 17:21 my pager went off with the mega alert as we walked along Rose Street searching for a suitable place to eat. The bird previously known as Lesser Crested Tern was now being reported as a Royal Tern which was obviously a different matter all together. I was somewhat on edge as such a good bird was obviously around and about and would be being looked for, if not at, as we ate, but I was relatively calm, all the same. A new-found philosophical attitude (due to lack of recent twitching activity) perhaps?

At 18:00 this demeanour changed somewhat, as the pager indicated that the Royal Tern had been reported on the wader scrape at Musselburgh at 15:45. By now we were all having a meal in Garfunkel’s – well we did have children with us! All the same the news was old and no further news could be considered good news in some ways. But this philosophical attitude bollox disappeared altogether soon after we arrived back at Dalmeny from Edinburgh on the delayed 18:45. It was 19:04 when the message was transmitted and I think it was as we faffed about with the pram in the station car-park I checked the pager and was stunned to find that the Royal Tern was roosting on the mudflats at Fisherrow Sands at 18:55.

We travelled back to Carlowrie Cottages and on arrival I helped Steve get his bikes out of the garage and put them back in the car bike rack, keen to help them on their way! I was though, the good host and made various drinks and then generally socialised whilst Gillian bathed and watered Ellen.

However, when Thomas asked to watch Coronation Street before they left, I became resigned to a less than rapid departure. Surely though, with two youngish boys they would get away fairly promptly. Meanwhile, pager indicated that the Royal Tern was still roosting on the mudflats at Fisherrow Sands at 19:24 and 19:45.

It was going to be do-able wasn’t it?

Steve, Karen, Thomas and James departed soon after 20:00, and Gillian and I quickly agreed that I should go for it. I am not sure just what time it was when I set off, but it must have been at least 20:05. Soon afterwards, the fourth message in a row indicated that the Royal Tern was still roosting on the mudflats at Fisherrow Sands at 20:08. This message was transmitted at 20:11, as I hurtled towards the City Bypass. Once on the bypass I reached peak speeds of 95 miles per hour. The excessive speed of my driving was not slowed any by a message that indicated that at 20:16 ‘it’ was flying over the Firth of Forth. What did this mean? Anyway, in an incredibly short space of time I was in Musselburgh, and had then to make the decision whether to go to the mouth of the River Esk or to the promenade car-park in Fisherrow.

I opted for the mouth of the Esk and so arrived there at some time around about 20:30. Kitted up and not a birder in sight I jogged around the sea cadet’s hut, to be confronted by some 20 or so birders lined up along the seawall and all looking too nonchalant! The first birders I chatted to were Dave Kelly and Ian Thompson. Dave Kelly seemed just a little too eager to tell me that I was too late, as after it had apparently been on the mudflats off Fisherrow and so visible from where the assembled crowd was for more than an hour it had flown off into the Forth some 15 or 20 minutes prior to my arrival, despite all my best efforts. Aargh!!! I then saw Graham Ekins, a fellow Wildlife Inspector, who I recognised from our annual seminar. He was a long way away from Essex, on a family holiday, and he had scored. We all had a general conversation, touching on Odonata and there was some consoling talk of it being around again tomorrow.

Then I saw Bernie Beck and his Tees-side crew and went over to meet them as they walked back towards us. Whilst I was chatting to Bernie, Mervyn Griffiths and Calum Scott came back from along the seawall, walking fast. As they reached the ‘crowd’ Mervyn shouted they had seen it fishing off the second lagoon and it had come back towards the River Esk mouth. Mervyn shouted, “Look at everything”, and so the scattered birders quickly reassembled along the seawall and started scanning the large flocks of roosting Sandwich Terns and other terns and gulls. Someone else who hadn’t seen it yet asked for confirmation of the birds’ plumage, and was told, “Winter plumage”, and everyone worked the flocks, in less than good light conditions as the sun was now breaking the cloud cover and setting over Leith (literally sunshine on Leith…). This, and the fact that we were all looking towards Leith meant we were all looking into the light, which was a very orange light when looking straight out where most of the Sandwich Terns were. Not the best when looking for an orange-billed tern!

In some ways perhaps this was also a blessing, as there was a last extension to the evening light. It was about 20:40 or perhaps even later. Apart from a general murmur of expectation and a few terse mobile conversations updating others on the state of events there was an intense silence. We all scanned backwards and forwards through the roosting flocks, and then was a general feeling that it was in there somewhere, but where?? I oscillated between optimism and pessimism. Would I catch up with it after all or was I just too late.....????

Then someone got on it. Instantly, others demanded directions, but how to give directions under the circumstances, so many birds, and so little to go off? Then as I scanned I jammed in on it – there it was in my ‘scope - the Royal Tern. Calum, who was stood just behind me had also got on it, and we shouted for others to find the barrel (or ws it the end of a tree stump?), for it appeared to him and to me that there was a barrel (or tree stump!) end on and directly behind the boy. (Confused? You should have been there!). This appeared to me to be a good way of giving directions as other than the multitude of tower blocks in the Leith skyline there was nothing to go off. I gave out the same advice and concentrated on making the most of my good luck both in getting there in the first place, and then getting on the bird very promptly and without directions.

It was facing into the north-easterly wind amongst the other terns and the most striking thing about it was the large, long drooping bill which even in the prevailing light conditions looked pale yellow with more than a hint of light green. Beyond that the size was difficult to determine as it was at quite a range and in amongst other similarly orientated terns. There were other birds against which to compare it but there was a lot of distortion due to the different distances involved. For instance, at one stage there was a Lesser Black-backed Gull behind the Royal Tern and they appeared to be of a similar size, but it was further away. Guessing I would suggest that the Royal Tern was bigger than a Common Gull but smaller than a Herring Gull and therefore Ring-billed Gull size. But it was very difficult to judge just how much bigger than the accompanying Sandwich Terns it was.

What was noticeable was the elongated head and neck, giving the bird a Slender-billed Gull like jizz. The head shape was oval and elongated, a point which was probably exaggerated by the head pattern and large, long drooping bill.

The beyond the head pattern it was difficult to see any real plumage detail. The head pattern struck me as a ‘dirty old man’ type hairstyle – bald, but with long, too dark, straggly hair at the back of the head. From this black remnant cap, which was confined to the rear of the crown and upper nape, there was a black eye-stripe, which connected the cap and the bill through the eye area. The eye appeared to be dark as well, but wasn’t actually seen well enough to be sure.

The bird briefly flew when there was mild consternation amongst the terns as a gull walked amongst them. It appeared to have very pale grey upper-parts and white under-parts, and because of the brief duration of the view and the distances involved and also the light conditions no other plumage detail was noted.

I stayed watching it and sampling the euphoria until the light had faded altogether, enjoying the excellent camaraderie of the predominantly Scottish and Scottish-based crowd, including a few who had arrived after me. There can have been no more than 30 or 40 people at most, definitely the chosen few of the Scottish birder scene.

I then left having said my good-byes including a handshake from Stuart Rivers. On the journey home I again experienced the ecstasy of a successful twitch. But only once at home that night when reading up about previous Royal Tern records did I realise just how successful the twitch had been. It appeared that all of the 4 – 5 previous records had been single observers meaning that probably no more than 50 people in the British Isles had Royal Tern on their list. Although we went back the following day, I suppose for this reason I was glad it wasn’t relocated, ensuring that there wouldn’t be a mass twitch.
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The preceding account was obviously drafted at the time (and subsequently re-formatted and edited).

However, despite the ebullient ‘context’ of this record described in the final paragraph above, it highlights one of the modern dilemmas that maintaining a bird list (be it the official British Ornithologists’ Union Records Committee (BOURC) British List, the total numbers of records of each species verified and maintained by the British Birds Rarities Committee, or my ‘official’ list), involves, that of taxonomy.

You see, our understanding of what constitutes a full species, has (appropriately) always evolved, and nowadays, for instance, involves the use of testing and differentiating samples for DNA to investigate the genealogical relationship of species, etc..

As such, we are in an episode of ‘splitting’, whereby more species are recognised, and what were previously considered to be just sub-species or races are now considered to be full species.

‘So what?’ I hear you say. Well, Royal Tern was previously regarded as comprising two geographically separated subspecies, Thalasseus maximus maximus, found in the Americas, and T. m. albididorsalis, found in West Africa.

Individuals of the two sub-species are morphologically near-identical, except for some subtle differences in bill morphology (redder and deeper in American birds) and biometric variations in mass and wing (the American Royal Tern is on average slightly bigger).

However, (prepare for some real science!) to elucidate the true phylogenetic relationship between the American and the West African Royal Terns, Martin Collinson and his co-authors analysed the DNA from birds of both populations as well as from the related ‘orange-billed terns’ (i.e., those species of the genus Thalasseus).

The results of this research were published in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society.

In spite of the morphological similarity, the DNA analysis revealed that the closest relative of the West African Royal Tern is not the American Royal Tern, but the Lesser Crested Tern (Thalasseus bengalensis) which is similar but smaller and with a yellower bill. This relationship is apparently well supported by both the mitochondrial and nuclear DNA.

As currently defined, the Royal Tern is a paraphyletic species (i.e., one which is part of a group of organisms descended from a common evolutionary ancestor or ancestral group, but not including all the descendant groups), and retaining maximus and albididorsalis in the same species with the exclusion of bengalensis does not reflect the true evolutionary relationships between all of these taxa.

Therefore, the study suggested that the Royal Tern should be split into two species by elevating both the American Royal Tern and West African Royal Tern to the species rank, as Thalasseus maximus and T. albididorsalis respectively.

This recommendation was duly adopted by the International Ornithological Congress (IOC), and as such by the BOURC, which formally adopted the IOC World Bird List for all its taxonomic needs, including the British list, as of the 1st January 2018.

Thus, Royal Tern has officially became two separate species, but therein lies the problem, as in the fraught circumstances involved that evening at Musselburgh, no one was able to determine sufficient detail in terms of the exact size of the bird involved or the subtleties of the shape and hue of its bill, or, more to the point, take suitable photographic images to evidence the same.

So, although the record was officially accepted as a Royal Tern, this is now jeopardised as insufficient detail was recorded to determine (at the time) which of the two subspecies was involved. As such, should there be a review of accepted records (which presumably there will) this record will probably get assigned to Royal Tern spp. (rather than either American Royal Tern or West African Royal Tern).

Having seen the Elegant Tern in July 2021 I updated my list online on both the BUBO and RBA websites and discovered, in the process, that I might soon be deprived of my Royal Tern tick owing to the official ‘split’ as described above.

Therefore, I e-mailed Calum Scott to enquire whether or not there might be anything we could do to prevent this happening (by, somehow, gathering – and submitting – better evidence, if it existed). Calum was supportive of this idea, and volunteered that the bird was, he thought videoed and / or photographed at the time by a Graham ????, but that the evidence had been lost in the recesses of an attic or similar.

I also contacted Ian Andrews, the original finder, who provided a lot of background material and suggested that he had always considered the bird to be more like a West African Royal Tern (as well as pointing out that if this could be proven, it would be a first for Britain and, as such, would have to be assessed by BOURC!).

Ho-hum. As I say, the joys of trying to maintain a list in the 21st century!