Terns

These winged white wanderers travel the world in hoards, scouring every inch of land for food and a fast place to call home as they spread their wings over the entire globe. The ocean serves as a spacious predator free backdrop to their lives. A never ending expanse of blue that they can always clamor back to if things on land get too dangerous. Terns are seabirds in the family Sternidae, previously considered a subfamily of the gull family Laridae. They form a lineage with gulls and skimmers which in turn is related to skuas and auks. Terns have a worldwide distribution. Many terns breeding in temperate zones are long-distance migrants, and the Arctic Tern probably sees more daylight than any other creature, as it migrates from its northern breeding grounds to Antarctic waters. One Arctic Tern, ringed as a chick on the Farne Islands off the Northumberland coast in eastern Great Britain in summer 1982, reached Melbourne, Australia in October 1982, a sea journey of over 22,000 km (14,000 statute miles) in just three months from fledging—an average of over 240 km per day, and one of the longest journeys ever recorded for a bird.Terns generally nest in large, densely packed colonies. Depending on the species and habitat, the nests may consist of unlined scrapes in the ground, or of flimsy collections of sticks or floating vegetation. Terns are generally long-lived birds, with several species now known to live in excess of 25–30 years. This sound uses the following file from Freesound: http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=120902