Monthly Archives: January 2015

The Case of the Elusive Spoonbills

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Normally when you go looking for something like I did when I decided to go to Texas and photograph Roseate Spoonbills, you do a little research. You ask around among people who have recently been there. You check the forums online for postings of your quarry, you check in with the naturalists at the very bird refuges you plan to shoot at, and you do everything else you can to even the odds a little.

The first problem comes in when you get there and there are no Roseate Spoonbills. The second problem starts when you begin hearing phrases like “Yeah I was out there a few days ago and there were tons and tons of them.” Now an adult Roseate Spoonbill weighs in at approximately 4 lbs. fully feathered so that means you get about 500 to the ton. And tons usually means around three tons. So we’re talking maybe 1500 bright pink 28 – 32″ long birds with great big flat round bills that squawk like a bullfrog that just heard his first frog in a blender joke, and are supposedly just “out there”. I’m thinking that would be kind of hard to miss.

Instead, because you’ve just driven over 2000 miles to photograph these birds, what you find is one solitary bird standing in a ditch by the road and by the time you get your rig shut down and your camera ready he’s long gone to meet up with the other 1500 birds that are now 30 miles from where you are. And he wasn’t even fully pink.

Days go by. You work diligently following up on rumors and sightings and hunches and the old “Oh what the hell, lets look over there” style of research, with not even one more sighting of one Roseate Spoonbill. Your deadline is fast approaching for when you have to call it quits and shut down this operation so you can head for home and you’re getting desperate. This is when you begin to think of options like buying a chicken and painting it pink. If you fuzz up the image a little and have it stretch its neck out some and get it to stand in some really shallow water, you can probably add the spoon part of the bill in Photoshop later, who’s going to know. Desperation makes you, well, desperate and you’ll try nearly anything, just please, please don’t let me get skunked and not shoot one for real.

But then because you must have done something right in another life, and miracle of miracles, you find yourself on the last day, in the last place there could possibly be any birds. You’re walking that last frustrating walk out to the end of the pier and there in the lee of the reeds in perfectly flat, mirror-like water so you get perfect reflections, in the very last of the failing light, you find Spoonbills. Not the 1500 you were taunted with but nine of them. Nine. But nine is enough. Turns out that most people who actually do see Spoonbills in this area at this time of year only see them in onesie’s and twosie’s and if they’re real lucky three or four. So nine is good.

There’s about twenty minutes of workable light left before it goes full dark so there is no time to fool around. If you want to see them, do it through your viewfinder, but get busy and work the shutter. And because this is a perfect ending kind of story the birds hang around posing until the very last moment when the sun goes completely down below the horizon before they lift off in unison for parts unknown. A perfect end to a now perfect day.

Some experienced birders who actually know what they’re doing say that there ARE large flocks where there are “tons and tons” of them but that’s over in Florida and another 1000 miles from where I am. And yeah I would be considered lucky to see as many as four in a flock. So I didn’t do too bad for a first timer shooting the elusive Spoonbills down on the Gulf coast.

Riverwalk

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First off I have to apologize to Texas. Texas I’m sorry. Seriously. I had never been to Texas before although I had been to eastern New Mexico so I thought, like I hope many others have so that I’m not entirely alone here, that there wasn’t a stitch of color in Texas. At least no primary colors. OK so occasionally you’d see a splash of red next to an armadillo road kill, or possibly that incredible yellow that big-haired Texas women with names like Birdie, Emma Louise and Big Leg Kathy, can get in a fresh perm, but no real color. Man, was I wrong. Sitting in a roadhouse eating the worlds biggest Tex-Mex combination plate one evening I casually mentioned my misbegotten prejudice to one of those self-samed big-haired women. I was told politely but firmly in that way that only big-haired, but beautiful Texas women have, that “Honey, you’d best get yourself on down to San Antonio and take a stroll through the Riverwalk. Then y’all come back and talk to me about color. You go on now.”

Because I had never been there before my only experience of Texas was the occasional movie, like “The Last Picture Show”, or “Tender Mercies”, and that sleeper “The Stars Fell on Henrietta” where all you saw was endless stretches of no color, only a vista filled with a tan that shifted just enough towards grey that you’re stretching it to call it tan. A place where a dust devil gave you some occasional relief because it was a lighter shade of tan that contrasted with the rest of the countryside. But I was misinformed about that too, as the hill country in West Texas has a muted palette that grows on you as you travel down those endless highways. Filled with the paler darker greens of the low-lying mesquite, the more vivid lime green color of the yucca with its creamy ivory and pale yellow flowers as it bloomed along the roadway, hints of red in the stone where the road builders had deeply cut through the hill, it was colorful just different. And as we all know just being different doesn’t make you bad. It might make you a little weird but not bad.

I was headed south down to Brownsville which is the furthest south you can live and still be an American, to spend the Christmas holiday with some VIP’s that winter there. These VIP’s who would like to remain nameless (fat chance) but are really my sister Marcia and her partner Paul who I call my Brother-in-law because it’s easier than calling him “my sister’s partner-in-law” had promised that if I came down for the holidays she would fix me Spaghetti for Christmas day. I did, and she did, and Christmas was splendid. She is after all the world’s greatest spaghetti sauce maker and what better way to spend Christmas than with loved ones stuffing your fat face with Bolognese. Before I got there though I took heed of the advice given me by that gorgeous big-haired woman who told me to stop in San Antonio to see the color of the Paseo del Rio, or the Riverwalk, along the San Antonio river.

Now I could spend hundreds of words describing the Riverwalk, how it’s one story below the streets of the city, how it’s five feet deep, and every other fact that you need to know to be a proper tourist, but as you know, being proper isn’t one of my major priorities. If you need to know that stuff, Google it. They do a much better job than I would in telling you everything you need to know. Besides, I hear those kind of things, that fact stuff, and it’s going in one ear and out the other. I have the attention span of a 3-speed blender when it comes to facts and dates etc., but I never forget a color or a scene or the experience of participating in an amazing event like the Riverwalk.

As this was the night before the night before Christmas they had gone all out decorating the walkways that follow along the river. Lights of every color of the rainbow were strung along the shore with care, Mariachi wandered through the restaurants’ outside eating areas playing, the happy but surprised shouts of those unlucky few who toppled into the river and the resulting laughter of those nearby rang through the night. OK, I made that last part up. Nobody fell in the river although you could if you were determined enough. The tour boats came by every 20 seconds all lit up and filled to the gunnels with happy tourists. There was even a dinner boat that went by and we all got to watch 40 people drip green chili down the front of their clothes. It was by and large simply spectacular, the Riverwalk that is not the diners.

If you are color starved by the lack of them during the winter, or even if you just want to see one of the most amazing sights you can encounter, where you can walk in one end and come out the other gob-smacked, then you need to go to San Antonio and do the Riverwalk. It’s even pretty in the daytime.

The trip was successful. I have many, many images to show you and stories to relate, both fanciful and factual, but they are for a another time. Right now it’s good to be back.