Stalking the Mythical Roseate Spoonbill

Article & Images by Christopher U. Light

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When my wife and I became migratory and, in 1990, began to winter in Florida, the first book she bought was Florida’s Birds by Herbert Kale, David Maehr and Karl Karalus. On the cover was a drawing of a truly strange creature that looked like a cross between a flamingo and a Mississippi River paddlefish (a cousin, perhaps, to the jackalope). It was, we discovered from the book, a roseate spoonbill (Ajaia ajaja), a large pink and white wading bird with a shovel-shaped yellow bill it uses to poke around in shallow water and mud looking for insects, crustaceans and small fish. It became the bird we most wanted to see.

Over the next several years on visits to the Everglades, Corkscrew Swamp and numerous Florida state and county parks my birding wife spotted and pointed out to me practically every kind of egret, ibis, heron, sandpiper, tern, gull and woodpecker found in Florida along with bald eagles, owls, hawks, ducks, songbirds and anything else with feathers. She knows her birds, and, through her, I’m learning them too.

The list grew: ruddy turnstone, scrub jay, pileated woodpecker, carolina wren… but no roseate spoonbill.

Every year as we drove down to Florida we’d say to each other, maybe this year we’ll see a spoonbill. Every year… no luck. Once or twice a friend would claim to have spotted one. Did we believe the claim? Of course we did, but… Finally we began referring to it as “the mythical roseate spoonbill.”

One year at Ding Darling Sanctuary on Sanibel Island a flock of large shore birds flew over head very high. Our hostess said, “Look up. Those are roseate spoonbills.” Squinting we thought we could see a little pink on them, but no spoon-shaped bills. They were just too far away. They could have been any light-colored large water bird. We believed her of course, but we still felt the bird’s full scientific name must be Ajaia ajaja mythicus.

In 1997, seven years after we began our search, we were at one of our favorite sites, the spillway for Lake Myakka at Myakka River State Park. There, on a mudflat where we often spotted egrets and ibises, was a flock of perhaps a dozen roseate spoonbills. A park ranger told me they had flown in the night before and could be expected to remain a few days.

I was ecstatic.

I was also prepared.

My specialty is flower photography and black and white landscapes, not birds. Most of my equipment both in medium format and 35mm consists of macro lenses, wide-angle lenses, extension tubes, a ring flash etc. For many years the longest conventional lens I owned was only 200mm, and was used rarely. However, since becoming migratory, I wanted to be ready for any interesting bird opportunities, but not at the expense of a lot more weight in my camera bag or a large cash outlay.

I compromised. At the time my 35mm camera was a 20-year old Olympus OM-1, a completely manual camera with an untrustworthy built-in exposure meter. At a Florida camera shop that hadn’t yet joined a national chain and still had a whopping inventory I found not only a used Tamron 500mm mirror lens but a 2x tele extender for it in an Olympus mount. For a couple of hundred dollars I now had a light-weight, hand-holdable 1000mm lens.

If you’ve ever used a mirror lens, you know it’s not of professional quality. The aperture is fixed at f.8. With a 2x tele extender the aperture becomes f.16. The sharpness is only so-so, but adequate for small enlargements. Out-of-focus spectral highlights appear as donuts. Exposure is modified by small rear-mounted neutral density filters and shutter speed. And, if like me you prefer hand-held work whenever possible, the shutter speed has to be at least 1/1000 sec., so there’s not much latitude there either.

What you’re left with for exposure control is film speed. At the time Kodak marketed a 1600 speed Ektachrome slide film. That’s what the box claimed. The fine print inside told the truth. It was really 400 speed film that by extending the developing time could be pushed one stop to 800 or two stops to 1600. (For transparencies you don’t need film labeled 1600 speed. Both Kodak’s and Fuji’s 400 speed slide film can be pushed one or two stops just fine). At those speeds the film is grainy, but enlargements from slides taken with a mirror lens are limited anyway.

It was perfect. Using the “sunny sixteen rule” (in bright sunlight at f/16 you set the shutter speed at the reciprocal of the film speed), I could use my 1000mm hand-held amateur setup to stalk the no-longer mythical roseate spoonbill.

The spoonbills were on a mudflat in the Myakka River. I walked out on a sand spit as close as I could, watching out for the large alligators that congregate in that part of the river. The birds were mostly just poking around in the mud looking for food. Occasionally when one would flap its wings or even fly for a bit, I was ready, but only used one roll of film that day.

I came back the next day and shot another roll. The third day the flock was down from a dozen spoonbills to half that. A few days later when we came back to the park, the flock was gone.

That was six years ago. My wife and I have visited Myakka State Park many times since then, and we always walk to that spillway to check the birds on the mud flat. We’ve never again seen spoonbills there: Egrets, ibis, moorhens, an American avocet, a black-necked stilt, but never another roseate spoonbill.

We did see a flock of a dozen large birds on that mudflat the last time we were there. I called them “buzzards”, but my wife, the birder, corrected me. They’re properly called turkey vultures, she reminded me.

But no roseate spoonbills—Maybe they are mythical, after all. And yet I know it wasn’t a dream. I have the photographs to prove it.

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