Sooty Tern

The sooty tern is a seabird in the family Laridae. The genus name is from Ancient Greek ''onux'', "claw", and "prion", ''nail''. The specific ''fuscatus'' is Latin for "dark".

It is a bird of the tropical oceans, breeding on islands throughout the equatorial zone. Colloquially, it is known as the wideawake tern or just wideawake. This refers to the incessant calls produced by a colony of these birds, as does the Hawaiian name ''ʻewa ʻewa'' which roughly means "cacophony". In most of.. more