Thalasseus elegans
Drawn from open occurrence records in and around Channel Islands National Park, aggregated onto a 25 km grid. A cell is matched by its centre, which can sit up to 16 km outside the boundary, so this covers the surrounding country too.
Occurrence records measure where people looked and found something, which is not the same as where the animal is. This is a relative likelihood, not a probability.
Records exist for March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October and November, with the widest coverage in July. A quiet month can mean the animal was absent, or that nobody was looking.
A grid cell is a square of the map, not a sighting: 9 squares of 25 km carry records for Elegant Tern in and around Channel Islands National Park, and the 3,028 records behind them were collected by other people and published openly. Nothing here counts animals, and a place with more records is not always a place with more animals.
Corcovado, Monteverde and the Osa Peninsula are among the four atlas places where the Elegant Tern is recorded. Records of this bird concentrate in the United States, Mexico, Chile, Peru and Costa Rica. The atlas contains about 215,000 records from 14 countries, and the map shows where these records concentrate.
Of the 10 species with an atlas page recorded in and around Channel Islands National Park, the Elegant Tern is the 4th most recorded.
The full atlas page, and everywhere else it is recorded