Reader’s wildlife videos

Tara Tanaka has returned (this video was not shown for two years) with a lovely video of Roseate Spoonbills (Platalea ajaja) feeding, preening and dunking on her property. They remind me of my ducks!

Tara’s notes are indented below; her Vimeo page is here and her flickr page here.

A Vision in Pink

In the spring of 2023 we had at least 16 Roseate Spoonbills visit our swamp, some of them here for almost two months.  Two of the birds were adults in full breeding plumage, and the rest were juveniles likely fledged the summer before.  All of the birds in this video are juveniles.  In the traveling I’ve done I’ve never seen 16 Roseate Spoonbills at one time, and to have that many here in our cypress swamp for such a long time was quite a gift.

This video includes some of the highlights of their time here, with the opening and closing scenes shot from the living room (!)  They bathed, preened, dried, fed and spent a lot of time roosting.  I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a bird species that had so much time to just roost without having to hunt for food — they must be very efficient feeders.  One day there were very high winds and three of the spoonbills tried to hunker down in a large cypress where a wise old Wood Stork was easily riding out the winds.  The old stork chose a very large branch and faced into the wind, while the young spoonies struggled to keep their balance in the middle of much smaller branches. 

Last spring I kept hoping that some or all of these birds would return and nest, but I never saw even one spoonbill last year.  I keep looking out the window hoping that this will be their year to nest here.

As these are all juveniles, I put a photo of adults from Wikipedia below. It’s labeled: “Foraging roseate spoonbills at Merritt Island, Florida, United States.”  An excerpt from the article:

Little is known about the roseate spoonbill’s behavior outside of their foraging habits. This species feeds in shallow fresh or coastal waters by swinging its bill from side to side as it steadily walks through the water, often in groups. Moreover, the spoon-shaped bill allows it to sift easily through mud.

The bird feeds on crustaceans, bits of plant material, aquatic insects, mollusks, frogs, newts and very small fish (such as minnows) ignored by larger waders.^[24][25][26] In Brazil, researchers found roseate spoonbill diets to consist of fish, insects, crustaceans, mollusks, and seeds, all foraged from limnetic/freshwater habitats.

Here’s their range: year-round is purple, and breeding range is blue. You can see that in the U.S. they are year-round only at the tip of Florida and along the Gulf Coast: