Endangered
Black-bellied Tern
Sterna acuticauda
The black-bellied tern is a tern found near large rivers in the Indian subcontinent, its range extending from Pakistan, Nepal and India to Myanmar.
Appearance
In the breeding plumage, the crown and nape are black and the upper parts are pale grey. The throat is white and the breast pale grey, gradually darkening to a black belly. The bill and feet are yellow or orange and the iris is reddish brown.
The black-bellied tern grows to a length of 32 to 35 cm (13 to 14 in). Outside the breeding season, the belly is whitish, the tail is reduced in length and the bill has a dark tip.
Range and habitat
The species occurs mostly in Pakistan, Nepal, India and Bangladesh, with a separate range in Myanmar. Its typical habitat is lowland rivers and marshes, and sometimes ditches and pools, at altitudes of up to about 700 m (2,300 ft). It is an entirely inland species and is not found on the coast.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
It feeds on insects and small fish, skimming over the surface of the water and ground to pick up insects, and plunging obliquely into the water to feed on crustaceans, tadpoles and fish. Breeding takes place from February to April, the nesting site usually being a flat sandy location near a river or lake, a sand spit or a sandy island.
It does not nest colonially but may nest with other birds such as river terns (Sterna aurantia), pratincoles (Glareola spp.) and Indian skimmers (Rynchops albicollis).
In crisis
It has become very scarce in the eastern part of its range and the International Union for Conservation of Nature has assessed its conservation status as being endangered.
Black-bellied Tern is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Black-bellied Tern, Wikidata item Q934603. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
