Bird Beauties of Viera

If you can't get a good photo of a great blue heron in Florida, there is something wrong with you. But you can get wonderful photos of all kinds of much scarcer and shyer birds at Viera Wetlands, and the photographers all know it.

A glossy ibis preens its coppery plumage.

You beautiful thing. For this birdwatcher, for decades, glossy ibis have been just dark shapes through a spotting scope, and now here you stand right before me, preening unconcernedly.

A drake hooded merganser hides in the rushes, yellow eye like a panic button.

He gathers his mate and out they glide, and I am too close to get them both in (I'm digiscoping with Bill of the Bird's Leica rig, and loving every second of it). For more on the equipment I rather inexpertly used for my closeups, go to Jeff Bouton's Leica Birding Blog.

White ibis are confiding and nice, and pretty much everywhere around Space Coast.

 But the limpkin is a specialty of Viera Wetlands, and this is where wonderful photographers like my friend Marie Read come to immortalize them. Just look at her gallery of a spectacular limpkin fight at Viera!

They were in a much more pacific state of mind when we visited, but the air still rang with their staccato calls. Limpkins, more closely related to cranes than to their lookalike ibis, specialize in eating apple snails, and the empty shells strewn on the shore attested to their efficiency. I love their Latin name: Aramus guaruna. The origin of Aramus is unknown, according to Ernest Choate's Dictionary of American Bird Names, but the Guaruna are a tribe inhabiting the Orinoco region of Venezuela. There are not many bird names in Choate's gem of a book whose origins are unknown, and I like the air of tropical and systematic mystery surrounding this strange and noisy bird. According to Whatbird.com, it's called "Limpkin" for its jerky, awkward flight, but the Internet is full of tautologies. Jury's out on that. I can attest that the limpkin's haunting, hollow, cackling call has much of the resonance of the sandhill crane's purr, and that's good enough for me. Here's "Inspirational Sheila's" brief video of a limpkin calling. I have to confess I hadn't really thought about the limpkin's crane affiliations, but the voice truly gives it away. Listen to this bird's putts and then the full-out cry.

It was good to see and hear this dusky little brother of the crane.

News flash! A palm warbler actually on a palm!!  a sabal, to be exact. I like this photo a lot. You can even see its shadow.

                                                                                   

A shoveler nearly in full breeding plumage. Most of them were looking tatty.  

A lady of the lake (tricolored heron) fishes the clear waters. Hard to believe they were in a shower or toilet at one point...

Sun has its myriad attractions, but the colors of tricolored herons really show nicely in overcast, as on this rainy first visit to Viera.

The once endangered wood stork, another success story for conservation. I really though I'd never be lucky enough to see one, so critically endangered were they when I was growing up. It seems Ol' Ironhead is everywhere now. How lovely to have a true stork in North America. Nyah nyah, Old World. We got one too

and ours has pink feet!

Spectacular birdie he is. I almost drove off the road on my first visit to Fort Meyers in the early 90's, when I saw a bunch of wood storks in a roadside ditch. While I was growing up, wood storks were quietly making a comeback in Florida, spreading through the Southeast. I hadn't known. And now they are a reasonably common sight.

So many things to celebrate! It is what it is, and much of it is good.

Florida CSI

As we looked and took in all that Viera had to give us, we relaxed. We moved from one beautiful thing to the next. We all fell into the moment, let it stretch to hours, and didn't want it ever to end.

Phoebe found a pile of coot feathers, and the hunt was on to nail the murderer. For certainly it was premeditated.

Webb is an ex-cop, and he launched an investigation. 

 Figuring the coot was nabbed down by the water, he quickly found fresh pugmarks of a bobcat.

He'd had his suspicions anyway. He didn't think a raccoon would be quick enough to grab a coot.

The coot's wing feathers had saliva on them and looked chewed on, consistent with mammalian predation. An avian predator will bend wing feathers with its beak, but leave no saliva or fraying.

It was fun to puzzle out a natural mystery with a real live cop, one who taught crime scene photography, among other things. Webb doesn't miss much. He kept pointing out gators to Liam, for which Shoom will be forever grateful. 

Viera Wetlands is actually a water treatment facility, though you might not know it to look at the carefully managed vegetation in the impoundments. It has to be the most beautiful turd tumbler I've ever seen. A destination all of its own. And the management is to be congratulated for encouraging birders by maintaining nice diketop roads and making it accessible to us.

 The vegetation acts as a huge biofilter for the sewage, and the air is sweet and the birds are well-fed and healthy. Each impoundment has different chemistry and ecology, and it's fascinating to see.

And yet...A native Floridian I spoke with said, "I won't go there. I hate what's happened to Viera. You think it's beautiful now. You should have seen what was there before they made it into a sewage treatment facility." And this is the paradox that is Florida. People are always mourning what was there before the now. I understand, being one who remembers the before in my own region, and took her comments as sincerely as they were meant. I was glad I didn't know that when I visited. I was taken in by the birds and the marshes, and I hadn't stopped to think about what might have been replaced. Viera itself is bloated with strip malls, pavement, golf courses and planned communities, and there has to be a place for all that waste, doesn't there? 

I will say this. Viera Wetlands is a spectacular bit of  environmental mitigation. But mitigation it is, and I am glad there are those who still remember that, who treasure their memories of before. Head in hands, deep cleansing breath. Forge on. It is what it is...

Dear Friends, Ducks and Egrets

 This is me, in bird form, in Florida. Basking, that's all I wanted to do. To go from 22 and grey flannel skies to 72 and sunny: pure heaven.


There are so many reasons for an Ohioan to be excited about going to Florida in January. First, our lousy winter weather. The cold and snow clamped down at Thanksgiving and haven't let up yet. Sunny winter days? We've had a handful, but not nearly enough. The snow shovel is parked permanently at our front door. There's no sense in putting it in the garage, because most mornings we have to use it to get to the garage.

Second, the famous Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival, at which Bill of the Birds has been featured as a speaker and field trip leader for the last four years or so, while I've held down the wintry fort here in Ohio. I've always been resigned to hunkering down in January, because that's his busiest travel month. This year, we decided to switch off. Had I known what fun it would be to speak and help lead a field trip there, I'd have been yanging about going years ago.  From my first phone conversations with festival pillars Barbara Hoelscher and Neta Harris, I was hooked and ready to rock.

Third, the people I might be able to meet face to face. I set about machinating to try to lure three Floridians whom I was dying to meet to the festival. And succeeded.

Fourth, fabulous birds and animals. Enough said.

About those Floridians. Two of them are Bill and Michele Webb. Bill comments here (although not quite as much as he does on Murr's blog) as the always insightful and gracious Digitalzen. And he blogs at Crackerboy, where you can read his account of our get-together. Of course, he can't restrain himself from plugging Murr yet again, even in a post that was ostensibly about ME.

See, I was sure in my bones that I would like Crackerman as much in person as I do online. Sometimes you just know. I have to say I knew that about Murre, too.

And I cackle to point out that for the time being I have it all over Murre, because I have spent Quality Time with Bill and Michele and she has, as yet, not. And I have the photos to prove it. We decided to take a MonkeyCam shot of the five of us, and Webb, having much the longest arms in the bunch, was elected to hold the Canon G-12. Because its screen can turn and swivel backward, you can point the camera at your own face and see what you're shooting! Oh!  For those who are not familiar with MonkeyCam, that's Bill of the Birds' name for a photo of the photographer taken by the photographee.  And I'm my own grampa.

Well, how do I work this? Webb took this shot without knowing it. Har!

We finally got it mostly right, Webb having to fold himself into the shot, being one tall drink of water. His wife Shel is constructed on a more human and reasonable scale. Durn Phoebe's going for TDOW status, too, and Liam is following closely behind. Sigh. Shel and I will have to drive minicars in the Shriner's parade when that happens.

Phoebe snapped off a few photos, including this one of the three of us Chimping in the Viera wetland marsh, wondering out loud whether we're looking at pennywort or sumpin' else growing down there in the water.   We ran through our considerable mentalbotanical catalogues and came up empty.

                                                                                
And we spent a completely lovely day together doing just such timeless and meaningful things. We looked at beautiful birds who flock to the Viera Wetlands to fish and feed and mate and party. Where else can you be assured of arms-length looks at American bitterns? (and often least bitterns?)          

Blue-winged teal glide by

and slice the air with sky-blue wings. What a nice detail to put on a duck, that big epaulet of dusty cerulean.

There are all manner of leggy waders like this suspicious little cattle egret

 this lovely snowy egret (taken in the rain on our first, aborted attempt to visit the wetlands--we got squalled out).

and his great egret cousin, afrill in aigrettes

These are the plumes, grown as breeding season approaches, that very nearly caused the great egret's extinction in the U.S. They looked so nice on ladies' hats that great and snowy egrets were shot right in their nesting colonies to supply the craze. And from the outrage of bird lovers everywhere grew the National Audubon Society, to oversimplify it quite a bit.

Like fox fur and coats, aigrettes look infinitely better on egrets. What a trophy this ol' boy would have been for the hat hunters! Now he can wear them with pride, and not have to worry about being rubbed out for his plumes.