parasitic jaeger
These fiercely aggressive birds harass the terns relentlessly, sometimes three pursuing a single tern, trying to force the tern to release a freshly caught fish from its beak, which is seized in mid-air by one of the aggressors. Terns are fast, but the rapacious jaegers (the name means "hunter" in German) seem to be even faster and are capable of breathtaking aeronautical maneuvers. They seemed to be indifferent to our presence and more than once raced past only a few feet of our faces. It would take considerable practice to follow a bird like this with an extended zoom lens and capture consistently sharp images. This is the best one I got from a bird flying fairly close to my camera. I have seen these birds in the waters off Cape Cod, occasionally chasing a tern over the beach in Wellfleet, but we saw many more in Iceland than I've observed in New England.
Glacier Lagoon, Iceland (10 August, 2017)
parasitic jaeger
These fiercely aggressive birds harass the terns relentlessly, sometimes three pursuing a single tern, trying to force the tern to release a freshly caught fish from its beak, which is seized in mid-air by one of the aggressors. Terns are fast, but the rapacious jaegers (the name means "hunter" in German) seem to be even faster and are capable of breathtaking aeronautical maneuvers. They seemed to be indifferent to our presence and more than once raced past only a few feet of our faces. It would take considerable practice to follow a bird like this with an extended zoom lens and capture consistently sharp images. This is the best one I got from a bird flying fairly close to my camera. I have seen these birds in the waters off Cape Cod, occasionally chasing a tern over the beach in Wellfleet, but we saw many more in Iceland than I've observed in New England.
Glacier Lagoon, Iceland (10 August, 2017)