I generally don’t get my local birding information from world-famous authors, beloved by millions. But on occasion I do.
For instance, I was at a holiday party the other night, and Judy Blume was there. She started telling me a story about seeing a guy with a camera on a tripod at the Key West Nature Preserve on Atlantic Boulevard. She asked him if he was looking for the crocodile that was alleged to live there, and which she was a little bit worried about. (American crocodiles are rarely aggressive toward humans. Also, Judy has walking sticks to defend herself.)
The guy with the camera on a tripod said no, he was looking at a pair of roseate spoonbills, and let Judy have a look.
You can’t go wrong with pink birds.
Roseate spoonbills aren’t exactly rare in the Keys, but they are seen not so often in Key West, and twice as not so often in winter. Usually they’re farther north, in their breeding colonies.
The Everglades and Florida Bay used to be a stronghold for breeding roseate spoonbills, but over the last several decades their numbers have begun to decline in the region. In the late 1980s, there were thought to be up to 900 nesting pairs in Florida Bay. By 2021, the number was down to 157. This is largely thought to be the result of climate change, but also due to changes in hydrology in the Everglades.
What is interesting, and heartening, about all this, is that the North American roseate spoonbill population hasn’t declined overall; it has just moved north, with new colonies forming in places like Fort Myers, Tampa Bay, Cape Canaveral, and even farther north, such as Georgia and South Carolina.
I sometimes get wary of going out with the intention of seeing a specific bird, largely because of how often I fail. And having recently spent two afternoons hanging around Fort Zach, hoping and failing to see the reported golden eagle, didn’t help.
But once Judy put the idea of spoonbills into my head, I decided to sidestep my reflexive disinclinations. Fortunately it was not a terribly wild holiday party, and I made it down to the nature preserve not long after sunrise.
The Key West Nature Preserve is just under seven acres of beachfront and largely mangrove habitat, which somehow avoided being filled in and built on. There is a salt pond in the middle, though no clear view of it. You have to sort of find gaps and holes in the layers of foliage in order to see things. You can sometimes see things from the bike path, but I usually have a little better luck on the wooden platform halfway to the beach, so I started there.
It was a gray day, the colors of the world muted by the lack of sunlight. From the edge of the platform, through an alignment of gaps in four layers of trees, I could see three or four wading birds, mostly white. One of them seemed to have a glow to him. I lifted my binoculars to see one of the spoonbills, though the nominate bill was tucked into his wing pit. By the intensity of the pink, and the lack of magenta in the wing coverts, he looked to be a second-year bird.
He was standing on a pile of twigs, two great egrets bookending it on either side. There were also a half dozen blue-winged teal surrounding the twigs like parked boats.
No one was moving yet. Everyone was standing still, a bunch of bird statues. Even the no-see-ums biting my ankles were low energy.
Patience paid off, and in a few minutes the spoonbill lifted his head and took in the sights. He began to preen, going through the ritual-like motions of keeping his feathers orderly, something all healthy birds spend a significant part of their day doing. (It should be noted that roseate spoonbills are not sexually dimorphic. Males and females are visually indistinguishable, at least to us. But I don’t feel like going back and de-gendering any of the previous paragraphs, and there’s a 50% chance I’m right, so I’m just going to keep calling him him.)
The spoonbill stepped off the twigs into the water and preened some more. Several times he stopped and shook his head wildly from side to side, which made sense. Despite having mandibles shaped like a cereal-eating utensil, spoonbills feed by walking slowly through the water, their bills submerged and slightly open, scything slowly from side to side, clamping down whenever they feel a shrimp or insect. The head shaking was probably a good warm up for a day full of scything.
I gave in before I had a chance to see any of that, the no-see-ums finally wearing down my detached resolve.
Back on the bicycle path there was another guy 30 yards away with binoculars and a camera. Turns out it was Ben Edmonds, one of the four people who’d seen the golden eagle at Fort Zach (and whose photo I used in the column I wrote about it).
I asked him if he’d seen the spoonbill and he pointed and said he was looking at it, so I wandered over to where he was and had a much clearer look than I’d had on the platform.
He mentioned that he’d just put his tripod away.
I asked if he’d shown the spoonbills yesterday to a woman with a set of walking sticks.
He said he thought so.
“That was Judy Blume,” I said.
“What? Really? Judy Blume?” he said.
Yup. And she’s pretty reliable with the bird info.
