Wading Flurry

While staying near Cape Canaveral we desperately wanted to check out Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. After reading and hearing a lot about what was apparently one of the top birding locations in Florida, we wanted to see if it lived up to the hype...and it sure did. The refuge was created when unused land adjacent to NASA's John F. Kennedy Space Center was set aside for conservation purposes. One of its top attractions is a scenic wildlife driving tour called Black Point Drive which follows a winding road through various wetland habitats and impoundments and offers periodic interpretive stops along the way which are explained in an informative pamphlet that is available at the beginning of the tour.

By the time we started our tour it was mid-morning and already fairly busy. I was initially worried that we would be holding up the traffic since we like to take our sweet time when it comes to birding. But, it turned out the road was wide enough to allow passing and most of the other tour-goers were actually equally bird-crazy.

A  male (right) and female (left) northern pintail.

It wasn't long before we came across some interesting avian action. A large mixed-species flotilla of ducks and coots occupied a small lake which the road crosses, providing some good close-up views. A large proportion of these were northern pintails but also mixed in were northern shovelers, blue-winged teals, lesser scaups and a few pied-billed grebes.

 Soon after we came upon a small convoy of vehicles that had pulled over on the side of the road. Wondering what all the commotion was about, we parked and wandered over and were greeted by the striking sight of roseate spoonbills and white ibises foraging in the water only a few meters from the road. Roseate spoonbills truly are odd birds with their mismatched appearance which combines beautiful scarlet plumes, a scaly and downright dinosaurian head and an oversized spoon of a bill, a strange but highly effective foraging adaptation. 

The birds in this small group took off one by one after a few minutes and led us to the real feast just a few hundred metres down the road. 

Here we discovered a sizeable congregation of herons, egrets, ibises and spoonbills eagerly gobbling up whatever juicy tidbits lay below the water's surface. It was a frantic flurry of white feathers interspersed with the pink and scarlet colours of the spoonbills, the navy blues of tricoloured and little blue herons and the dark shimmer of glossy ibises.

A male hooded maerganser cruised around trying to get in on the action.

We (and a few other birders) observed and photographed this mesmerizing event for nearly half an hour before we managed to tear ourselves away. 

We were surprised by a sora while watching from a viewing platform at the end of a short trail.

One of the stops about halfway through the drive provides access to a hiking trail that meanders through the wetland. Unfortunately we didn't have time for what would surely have been a long diversion. 

 Continuing along the 7-mile drive in a more hurried fashion (we had a lot of the wildlife refuge left to see and only a few hours) we arrived at another crowd of foraging waders. Here we observed several snowy egrets attempting to catch fish in flight, a strategy that leaves the normally composed and elegant birds looking clumsy and disheveled. 

The dark glossy ibises sorely stand out amongst their predominantly white neighbours.

On a nearby lake swam a small armada of American white pelicans and further back a flock of over 20 little blue herons waded  all together in one spot. We even caught a glimpse of three wild boars scampering through the grasses and into tree cover on the opposite shore of a small pond. All in all it was an exciting tour. 

Afterwards we continued on to explore more of the Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge which produced other encounters that I will talk about in my next post.