Endangered
Peruvian Tern
Sternula lorata
Peruvian Tern is a shorebird in the family Laridae (order Charadriiformes) — Sternula lorata, recorded as Endangered.
Appearance
The upper half of the head and neck are black, and the remaining part of the head is white. The back, wings and tail are grey, the throat, chin and breast are white, and the chest, belly and flanks are pale grey. The under tail-coverts are white.
The Peruvian tern is a very small species with a length of about 24 cm (9.4 in).
Published measurements include mass about 7.
Range and habitat
This species is endemic to the tropical west coast of South America. Its range extends from north and central Ecuador, through Peru to northern Chile, as far south as the Mejillones Peninsula. Its status in Ecuador is unclear and in Peru it is known from four confirmed sites, breeding at the back of the beach in association with wetlands.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
The diet has been observed to include the Peruvian anchoveta (Engraulis ringens), the king gar (Scomberesox scombroides), the Peruvian silverside (Odontesthes regia) and the mote sculpin (Normanichthys crockeri). Breeding takes place between August and February but is mostly concentrated between October and January.
Some birds nest on beaches and dunes one to two hundred metres inland from the high tide mark, but others nest one or more kilometres inland on sandy plains. After breeding, the birds leave the coast and may move out to sea.
In crisis
It is threatened by habitat loss.
Peruvian 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 Peruvian Tern, Wikidata item Q1267945. 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.
