Spoonbills and Everglades.. An Ever-changing Environment

A flock of Roseate Spoonbills and egrets takes off from foraging grounds. The birds have relatively short legs compared to other wading birds, which means they can forage only in shallow water. Jerry Lorenz has calculated that water depths of 13 centimeters or below are ideal for concentrating fish to spoonbills' liking. BY HANNAH WATERS - PHOTO BY MAC STONE

Miles from shore, deeper in Everglades National Park than the public is allowed, I slowly sank to my ankles in mangrove muck under a low dome of twisted branches. Fish heads, feathers, and eggshells littered the ground. Pungent guano painted every leaf and branch; flakes of it sloughed off and hung in the air.

Shadows passed overhead, and when I peered up through the canopy, I could glimpse herons and egrets rafting above like white pterodactyls—and then, a flash of spoonbill pink. Other birds squatted among the branches, croaking and chattering.

Amid the disorienting avian conversation rang more familiar voices—those of the field biologists who let me tag along to this quarter-acre mangrove island called Diamond Key. Casey King hovered above me, braced between a branch and a tree trunk, peering into a stick-and-leaf nest. “Three eggs in 27!” she shouted to Emily Johnson, herself wrapped around a trunk with a notebook and pencil in hand. Then, “There are four eggs in 17. I’m going to crawl over to 20; it’s right over your head.”

King scrambled into the next tree. “I got a baby! I got two babies!” I followed, grasping branches like the rungs of a ladder. Maneuvering above the nest, I inhaled sharply, lest my breath disturb them: Two Roseate Spoonbill chicks twitched next to an unhatched egg, their fragile pink bodies visible through soft white fuzz, each with a dainty orange spoon on its face. “These ones had to have just been born,” King said.

New life is always a wonder, but especially here and now. Diamond Key is one of the last spoonbill nesting sites in Florida Bay, and it offers a glimpse of the raucous, bustling colonies that once flourished throughout the region. Before plume hunters slaughtered them for their feathers, nearly driving populations extinct, more than a million wading birds lived in the Everglades. By the late 1970s, when colonies were once again thriving, 1,200 spoonbill pairs nested on Florida Bay mangrove keys alongside thousands of Great and Snowy Egrets, Great White and Tricolored Herons, and White Ibis. >>> READ MORE >>>