This reservoir is much bigger than it looks and having walked around the perimeter - by mid afternoon, it felt like several miles...
Check out the pic below - one way to save a walk and arrive in style is to hire a windsurfer!!
The causeway turned out to provide the best views of the morning and keeping the American Black Tern company was a juvenile White-winged Black Tern in tow. Capturing two birds with one burst then, was always likely to save a lot of effort and one productive pass across the reservoir when they were roughly the same distance out (pretty far out in fact!) yielded this series of images......
A key difference between juvenile American Black Tern (surinamensis) and our European counterpart (niger) is the presence of dark flanks - seen clearly in the two pics below. The other differences are summarised nicely in this link - here
Even though it was distant, I'd have settled just to see the White-winged Tern (and one tick for the day!) More record shots with that white rump clearly seen from afar....
Feather detail? Forget it, just glad to get these record shots in the bag.....
