Tag Archives: Florida

The Case of the Elusive Spoonbills

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ElusiveSpoonbills2929

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.

Old Number 95

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OldNo950740Scarlet Ibis                                                                     click to enlarge

Once while visiting Florida I met a bird walking down the road. It was what some know it all bird people, the ones who like to point out how ignorant you are because you don’t know the name, age and model of every bird ever made so they treat you like you have the IQ of a loaf of bread and they’re a toaster, call a Scarlet Ibis. I noticed him right off because he was a brilliant scarlet red bird with a huge nose. He didn’t seem to mind one bit that this legs were pink so I didn’t mention it. What was most curious however, was the garter he wore with the number 95 on it. He also had a collar on his other foot but that was easy. He’d obviously escaped from some chain gang they have down there and hadn’t had a chance to remove it yet.

What significance did the number 95 hold that he felt compelled to wear it so casually and blatantly, like a new tattoo? Was he the 95th bird counted, or the 95th specie of bird to be recognized by some organization like the Rotarians or Daughters of the American Revolution, or maybe AA? Was it adulterous and consequently it not only had to wear a scarlet coat but advertise how many times it had been so. He was a question begging for an answer.

Perhaps he was not only a commie but a flaming one at that, although commies are so over. It wasn’t sunburn, maybe on his feet, but not that shade of red. Also he was arrogantly red. There wasn’t a single ounce of apology for his redness in any part of his attitude, in fact if red had been an important person, he would have been the Pope, a sassy, hip kind of Pope that would dance the funky chicken without even being dared to and make his Cardinals join in too.

As someone who is compelled to find the answers to blatant statements and not only solve, but create non-problems like this one, I had questions. The problem however was I didn’t speak Ibis and he was disinclined to speak English, although I knew that he could. My attempts at communicating with sign language resulted in my getting smacked with his big nose to the point where I soon gave up, but he seemed to get in to it and I had to embarrassingly remove myself from the conversation by running away, making high-pitched squealing noises in an attempt to convince him I was an abject coward. He bought my ruse and after a quarter-mile or so left off chasing me.

Like many other things in life this is one of the problems that seems destined to be a mystery forever. I looked and looked but I did not see another Scarlet Ibis that had either the number 94 or 96 on its leg or any number on its leg at all. I failed to see another Scarlet Ibis period. Perhaps this was a clue. Maybe that’s how many there are left and he was the last one. If so it’s a good thing I took his picture because with an attitude like his he’s not going to be around much longer anyway. Now I’ve got to find some kind of cream or ointment to make these welts go down. Maybe an unguent will work. Those guys can really give you a whack with that big nose of theirs. This thing isn’t over, not while there’s answers to be found anyway. So, never fear, we don’t give up in the face of a little rejection, or painful welts. If there’s an answer we’ll find it, and that’s a fact, Jack.

Postscript: After some diligent research involving many long seconds on Google I found out what this guys real name is. Its Eudocimus Ruber. No wonder he’s red. I’d be mad as hell too. In fact I’d whack you with my big nose if you even looked at me whether you said it out loud or not. Eudocimus Ruber! His mother must have really hated him.

Ms Lucinda

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Lucinda0981click to enlarge

This is Ms. Lucinda. She man’s, woman’s, answers our 900 hotline here at the Institute, where she handles the complaints, suggestions, comments, solicitations, threats, follow ups to our Nigerian investments, pizza orders and is our all around girl Friday.

She occasionally becomes upset and loses her composure when handling some of the calls we get since the addition of our new phone service. We pay attention to this as Ms. Lucinda has a rather shadowy background, we don’t know much about her except she did some time in the Merchant Marines and may have been involved with training some of the troops that were used in those failed attempts to oust Fidel in the late 60’s. Be that as it may she has a rather spectacular vocabulary. In fact after listening to her for a while, even with a fair knowledge of human anatomy, you can not believe that people could actually do those things to each other or themselves. Also she carries a knife so we tend to give her plenty of space until she calms down.

The problem is this, when we were shopping around for a phone system to handle the incredible volume of calls we get daily we needed to have an 800 number so our readers wouldn’t have to spend their hard-earned money in contacting us. I’m afraid I must accept some of the blame for this myself, as I went for the lowest bid and worked with “Phones Ahoy” an off-shore media and communications company and was swayed by the glib salesmanship of one of their sales people.

My main objective was to get a reliable 800 number but they were incredibly expensive to operate and as we were between grants at the time, budget constraints led me to choose option B which was a 900 number. Nobody told me what a 900 number was and why 100 silly numbers between 800 and 900 would make such a big difference. The salesperson said it would increase our phone traffic and expand our personal contacts which is what we constantly try to do here at the Institute, to increase our visibility and allow us to raise more funds to do our  good work.

Also it would probably have been wiser to inform Ms. Lucinda about the change in our phone system. It turns out that not all of our incoming calls are from our readers, in fact I don’t know if some of the people that call in can read.  And who are these people they keep asking for. Glinny the wonder tongue, Helga, Mrs. Whipsong, Maurice, we don’t have anyone by those names working here, and we certainly don’t sell home health care products, whether they’re UL approved or not.

I can certainly understand why Ms. Lucinda gets upset, but in going over our phone statements I’ve noticed that we have been generating a certain additional income from this 900 number thing. It seems that we get money when these strange callers call in so we have instructed Ms. Lucinda to see if she can assist any of these callers further, as it turns out you make more money the longer you keep them on the phone. Hmmmm. So far Ms. Lucinda has been cooperative but I think she may be reaching the end of her tether so to speak, so I’ve instructed her to begin training one of the new interns in our new advanced telephone technique, just as a backup.

We have always been quick to adopt new technology here at the Institute so if this 900 number thing will help our bottom line then we’re going for it. Anything that will advance our ability to help our fellow human beings and make us some fast dough is a welcome addition to our program. Now if we can just keep Ms. Lucinda together until we get that second line in we’ll be golden.