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The UK Bird Atlas

Elegant Tern (Thalasseus elegans)Where and when to see it in the UK

Scarce migrant · reporting peaks July · Skimmers, Noddies, Terns, and Gulls · BOU category A

Records to 2026-08-16 · build 2026-08-31

Elegant Tern (Thalasseus elegans)
Regular Daddy, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Too few records to rate squares by month. Each marked square has at least one record; the table below gives the count and years.

Elegant Tern: relative reporting rate by 10 km square, September

Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2026 (grid squares, place names from OS Open Names). Northern Ireland place names: OSNI Open Data, OGL v3.0. County and country boundaries: Office for National Statistics, Open Government Licence v3.0. Coastline: Natural Earth. Bird records from the data partners listed here.

Elegant Tern has been recorded in 11 of the 2,971 10 km squares covering UK land (0%) in records to 2026. Scarce migrant in the UK. Reporting peaks in July.

Conservation status: Near Threatened (IUCN Red List, NT)
View on the IUCN Red List

Records by 10 km square

SquareWhereRecordsYearsVerified
SH39Isle of Anglesey, Wales1182021unverified
SD20Sefton, England172021unverified
SD34Lancashire, England42021unverified
SJ39Liverpool, England12021unverified
SD17Cumberland, England12021unverified
SZ89West Sussex, England992017 to 2018unverified
SZ19Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole, England22005unverified
SX97Devon, England82002unverified
SH53Gwynedd, Wales52002unverified
SX98Devon, England22002unverified
TG33Norfolk, England12002unverified

Spotted an error in a square? Report it and it goes into the review queue. Read the methodology for how classes, flags and sensitive-species rules work. Data to 2026.