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These elegant terns are flying in close formation as part of their courtship and pair-bonding rituals. They do this frequently, and often one bird (probably the male?) carries a fish, as seen in the lower right picture. These terns -- along with four other species -- were breeding at the Bolsa Chica wetlands in coastal Orange County, California. Click here for more flight pictures of elegant terns, royal terns, Forster's terns, least terns, and Caspian terns.
For photo geeks, the pictures were all taken with a heavy but stabilized 500 mm lens, hand-held, at shutter speeds of 1/1600 or 1/2000 second. Modern photographic technology really works: with the excellent autofocus ability of the lens and camera, almost all the pictures I took were very sharply focused -- but most were in awkward poses, or with wingtips outside the frame, or in bad light (what you see here are the best of many). And the next day, I was very sore in the wrists and shoulders from hefting the heavy rig.
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