Pat’s Wildways: Spoonbills

The pink birds are back! Roseate spoonbills that rival flamingos with their bright pink coloration are back in force along Heritage River Road off Heckscher Drive just a bit beyond the Sisters Creek Bridge. If you want to see them, head there now! Of course, sightings depend on the tides and feeding situation there when you show up. But if you hit it right when water from the St. Johns River flows into the marsh, bringing small prey into the channel, you are bound to see a show. At least we did this past week.

Scores of roseate spoonbills were lined up along the canal, along with their neighbors, some wood storks and egrets. It is fun to see their various feeding strategies. Both wood storks and spoonbills feed by touch — by detecting their small prey items with the touch of their beaks. Nearby, the egrets catch prey by watching for them and jabbing into the water to catch them. These two feeding strategies benefit both of them in synchrony, a form of cooperative feeding.



Video: Roseate spoonbills, wood storks and egrets on Heritage River Road.

When we first moved here nearly 30 years ago, roseate spoonbills were a delightful but rare sighting, and uninformed visitors sometimes thought they were seeing flamingos. I even once heard a tour guide driving a vehicle full of tourists pointing out the “flamingos” on the Greenway as they passed by. Ha ha. But now roseate spoonbills are getting to be more of a common sight and more people actually know what they are. Sure, a transient flamingo may pass through our area, but I have never seen one here; have you? But spoonbills are often visible on the Greenway and out in our marshes, and breeding groups for years have returned to the St. Augustine Alligator Farm and the Jacksonville Zoo, and for a while another group was active in Oyster Bay just off Amelia Island.

Roseate spoonbills and flamingos owe their bright pink color to the carotene in the crustaceans that they largely consume. It is this pink color that has long fascinated me, ever since I was a flamingo keeper at Miami Seaquarium decades ago. In captivity, without a diet of shrimp (which is usually too expensive) or a dietary supplement containing carotenoids — pink/yellow pigment precursors — flamingos and roseate spoonbills rapidly fade to white. But there is another reason some spoonbills look pinker than others in the wild — it depends on their age and breeding condition. Young birds are less pink, but those in breeding plumage glow a robust dark pink signaling their readiness to breed and their efforts to attract a mate. And, biologists have found that those birds with heavy parasite loads or are otherwise sickly are paler and not “in the pink” of health. Maybe that’s how we got that term?

Spoonbills have become more and more common in the years I have lived here. Where once they were considered to occur mostly in South Florida and south through the Caribbean and northern South America, their range is spreading northward, due to the warming climate. Breeding groups have been established in Georgia since 2011 and they are often seen as far north as coastal South Carolina.

Last summer, though, a group of roseate spoonbills visited New Jersey for five weeks and this created a hubbub among birders who traveled long distances just to see them. I learned this from my childhood friend Pat Weiss, who saw my Facebook post and told me about this. She wrote a column about the spoonbill phenomenon in her community newsletter. Bird watchers with long lenses gathered in groups near the birds, occasionally even climbing on top of cars to see them above the marsh grasses.

We are lucky here when it comes to spoonbill watching. You don’t even have to drive all the way down Heckscher Drive to see them nowadays. Right when you drive south off Amelia Island, just past the Nassau Sound bridge, you will see “Spoonbill Pond” on the left side of the road. There is a small place to park your car beside a boardwalk that lines the pond. There are always interesting birds to see there, spoonbills among them. And these past few weeks, a group of large while pelicans (a different and much larger species than our usual brown pelicans) are hanging out there too.

I hope I have encouraged you to go spoonbill looking yourself. And don’t forget your camera. Even my cell phone these days can get good spoonbill photos from Heritage River Road, and I don’t even have to climb on top of my car to do it!

Pat Foster-Turley, Ph.D., is a zoologist on Amelia Island. She welcomes your nature questions and observations. patandbucko@yahoo.com