They’re just not nesting in Florida Bay, the Everglades’ southernmost point, anymore. Their numbers are better in Florida than they’ve been in decades. Sea levels are rising along the bay, and it has become too deep for spoonbills to hunt and too salty to support their prey fish.ĭon’t get the wrong idea: Roseate Spoonbills aren’t failing. The cause, Lorenz surmises, is climate change. Over the past decade Florida Bay’s spoonbills have steadily declined from around 400 nests in 2012 to 157 this past season, of which 34 fledged young. “I was like, ‘What are my birds doing?’ ” “I started seeing things I just couldn’t understand,” he recalls. Then, starting around 2005, he noticed the species disappearing from the places he and they knew so well. When he began studying Roseate Spoonbills here in 1989, the population was fairly stable, ranging between 500 and 900 nests. 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.īut over the past 20 years, spoonbills have been abandoning their longtime nesting grounds-a pattern diligently documented by Jerry Lorenz, director of Audubon Florida’s Everglades Science Center. Before plume hunters slaughtered them for their feathers, nearly driving populations extinct, more than a million wading birds lived in the Everglades. 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. New life is always a wonder, but especially here and now. ![]() “These ones had to have just been born,” King said. ![]() 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. “I got a baby! I got two babies!” I followed, grasping branches like the rungs of a ladder. I’m going to crawl over to 20 it’s right over your head.” ![]() “Three eggs in 27!” she shouted to Emily Johnson, herself wrapped around a trunk with a notebook and pencil in hand. Casey King hovered above me, braced between a branch and a tree trunk, peering into a stick-and-leaf nest. Other birds squatted among the branches, croaking and chattering.Īmid 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. 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. Pungent guano painted every leaf and branch flakes of it sloughed off and hung in the air. Fish heads, feathers, and eggshells littered the ground. ![]() 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. AUDUBON BIRD GUIDE Search for Birds in Your Area.Equity, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging.The National Audubon Society protects birds and the places they need, today and tomorrow, throughout the Americas using science, advocacy, education, and on-the-ground conservation.The Flight of the Spoonbills Holds Lessons for a Changing Everglades-and World | Audubon Skip to main content
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |