Warbla

Warbla · Library

Common Tern

Sterna hirundo · Family Laridae

Sterna hirundo

Family Laridae

Order
Charadriiformes
Family
Laridae
GBIF occurrence records
3,084,750
Countries and territories with records
216
Common Tern
Alexis Lours · Common tern 2025 07 08 08.jpg · CC BY 4.0 · Alexis Lours · CC BY 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons · Recordings may be trimmed and re-encoded; photos are cropped and resized.
Play song · No machine-readable author provided. Mdf assumed (based on copyright claims). · Sterna-hirundo-002.ogg · CC BY-SA 3.0 · No machine-readable author provided. Mdf assumed (based on c · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons · Recordings may be trimmed and re-encoded; photos are cropped and resized.

About this species

This species has 3,084,750 occurrence records from 216 countries and territories (GBIF, 21 October 2026). Most records come from the United States (22.9%), Sweden (15.7%), the Netherlands (9.8%), Canada (9.4%) and Finland (7%); together they account for 64.7% of the total. In the United States, this species accounts for 0.064% of all bird records in GBIF.

The scientific name Sterna hirundo combines the genus name Sterna with the species epithet hirundo. The Warbla app catalog lists 13 species of the genus Sterna; apart from this one, those with the most GBIF records are Sterna forsteri, Sterna paradisaea and Sterna dougallii.

The catalog has GBIF record counts for 101 species of the family Laridae. This species ranks 9th among them; the family’s most-recorded species is Larus delawarensis. Its record count is 3.5 times the family average (874,525). The family Laridae belongs to the order Charadriiformes, which has 340 species in the Warbla app catalog.

More birds in the family Laridae

Credits & data sources