Cabot's Tern

About the Cabot's Tern

Cabot's tern (Thalasseus acuflavidus) is a species of bird in subfamily Sterninae of the family Laridae, the gulls, terns, and skimmers. It is found on the coasts of the eastern United States and Middle America, the Caribbean, Trinidad and Tobago, and in every mainland South American country except landlocked Bolivia and Paraguay, though rare in Chile. It is also a vagrant in eastern Canada and western Europe.

Cabot's tern was long placed in genus Sterna but since the early 2000s has been in its present genus Thalasseus. Its further taxonomy is not settled. The International Ornithological Committee (IOC) follows Efe et al. in part and treats it as a species with two subspecies, the nominate T. a. acuflavidus (Cabot, S, 1847) and T. a. eurygnathus (Saunders, 1876). The American Ornithological Society and the Clements taxonomy have not yet accepted Efe et al. and treat those two taxa as subspecies of the Sandwich tern (T. sandvicensis). BirdLife International's Handbook of the Birds of the World (HBW) follows a different conclusion to Efe et al. than the IOC by merging eurygnathus into acuflavidus but treats the merged taxon as one of two subspecies of... Wikipedia →