Terns are the lovely "sea-swallows" that give sparkle to the marine landscape. Smaller than gulls and more graceful, they can usually be known by their forked swallow-like tails. Most species are pearly-gray and white with red or yellow bills.

The sooty tern is the only species that is black above and white below. The sooty may be the most abundant of all the terns. In the Pacific Ocean and in the Indian Ocean I have visited colonies that numbered hundreds of thousands of birds. The clamor in such nurseries is ear-splitting.

The birds I have chosen to portray were watched and sketched in the Dry Tortugas, those fabled islands that lie off Key West in the Gulf of Mexico. Away from their nesting islands they are seldom seen at sea; the immensity of the ocean literally seems to swallow them up. Hurricanes occasionally carry strays from the tropical oceans to the shores of New England.

- Roger Tory Peterson