The drab but unusual sandwich tern

I LIVE ON the coast, where the typical sound of spring isn’t the song of the blackbird or the mistle thrush.

The harbinger of spring here is a seabird, the sandwich tern; its noisy call is usually heard a day of two after St Patrick’s Day. This year, however, the terns did not arrive until April 14, a full three weeks later than usual. Despite the pronouncements on global warming, spring is very late this year.

The bird owes its name to John Latham, an 18th-century English medical doctor and naturalist. Known as the “father of Australian ornithology,” he examined, and named, many bird specimens sent to England from Australia in the wake of Captain Cook’s expedition of 1768. But he also examined local birds and, in 1775, was sent the carcass of a tern near Sandwich in Kent. He named the bird after the village.