Florida Fun

http://birdsofsanibel.free.fr/

Florida is a great place for a beginning birder.  There are a lot of big and colorful birds down there, which makes for easy recognition.  Roseate spoonbills, swallow-tailed kites, painted buntings, storks -- they're unmistakable birds, and a newbie can impress herself with her newfound identification skills pretty quickly.

Until last month, I had, however, seen exactly one reddish egret in my life.  I don't think that there are that many of them, and they tend to stick to the southern half of Florida.  But one spring, when I was visiting my grandparents in Vero Beach and taking one of my frequent walks through the Jack Island Preserve, I came across a bird running around on the mudflats as if it had lost its mind.  It raced and jumped and dipped and circled; I thought it was a great blue heron that had become ill.  Extremely ill.

When I described it to my grandmother later, she asked me if it had been behaving as if it were drunk.  That was a bizarre question from my fairly straight-laced grandmother, and about a bird yet, but when I nodded, she pulled out her Peterson's field guide and pointed to the short description of a reddish egret.  As I recall, he said that one of its chief identifying traits was its tendency to race around as if it were inebriated.

(I have since learned that this behavior is a hunting technique.  By spreading its wings wide, the egret creates shadows over shallow waters, which schools of small fish mistake for safe havens under overhanging trees.)

It's probably been 25 years since I saw that bird.  I always hoped for another one, but since we spend most of our Florida time in the northern part of the state, I knew that another encounter was unlikely.

And yet...on my last morning in St. Augustine last month, as I walked far down the beach, there, fishing in a small tidal pool, was a large bluish bird with a long reddish neck, too small to be a great blue and too large to be a Louisiana, too placid to be a reddish egret, and yet: "You've got to be kidding," I said to myself.  But sure enough, a reddish egret it was.  I snapped several photos, all of which were terrible, but they were adequate for making a sure identification when I got back to our condo and my bird book.  (The photo above is reprinted with permission from a tremendous bird photographer.)

I've had a print of a reddish egret on my kitchen wall for years, a celebration of that afternoon on Jack Island.  Now I can add a St. Augustine morning to my store of birding memories.

Walked: 4 miles.