Day 11.176: Terns at Old Orchard Beach

Back on Day 11.173, as we walked from Ocean Park towards Old Orchard Beach in the hazy heat of the early evening, we saw several terns fishing in the shallow water near the beach. It's one of my favourite sights and has been since we were just visitors on the beaches of Maine six years ago (includes my best tern shot at the bottom).

I love to try to get good action shots, so we watched them patrol:

and dive:

and mostly come up apparently disappointed to try again:

Getting good photographs is hard, identifying the species of tern is even harder. I suspect that most (if not all) are common terns, but I wonder if the top left photo looks grey enough to be an arctic tern and whether this one:

has enough black on its bill to identify it as a "scarce" roseate tern (we know some nest fairly nearby).