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.

Marsh Birds of Guyana

Guyana is a wet, wet place. The coast lies 7 feet below sea level, and it's marshy and springy. People fish in the ditches right in town. We saw some large edible-looking fish roiling around where this man was fishing along the main highway.

So the common birds in Georgetown include marsh birds as well as garden birds. This is Donacobius, a black-capped mocking thrush, an odd thrashery yakky bird of tall reeds and somewhat uncertain taxonomic affiliations.
I was thrilled to see greater anis along with the more common smooth-billed kind. Greater anis are beautifully greenish-blue, with a pale eye and a beak like Hekyll and Jeckyll. They live and breed in colonies and blunder around with a weak, floppy flight.
I'd never seen a red-capped cardinal in the wild, but they are absolutely everywhere in Guyana, as common as our northern cardinal is in Ohio. They like rivers and marshes, and fly around in big flocks which include lots of brown-headed immature birds.

Black-crowned night heron peeks from a low limb.When I was a kid in Virginia, the National Audubon Society aired an ad, constantly, it seemed, about preserving Everglade wetlands for birds like the limpkin. Its rattling call rang regularly through our living room, and I built a childhood mythology around the limpkin, imagining it the rarest and most endangered of species. It is rare in North America (because its primary prey, the apple snail, has a limited North American distribution), but it's tolerably common in Guyana. When this limpkin uttered its resonant call, I was teleported instantly back to the gray couch with Early American eagles all over it in our Virginia living room, with Mom rattling and clanking around in the kitchen.
It flew as if it wasn't sure it would be able to land.
It takes a little while to get accustomed to the fact that the wattled jacana is one of the most abundant birds in Guyana. Every little puddle seems to have them. Still, they are birds of paradise to me, odd and strikingly beautiful. I don't know another bird that has chartreuse wings.

Here, a jacana raises those magnificent wings to reveal little orange bony spurs on its wrists, like candy corns. Used in fighting? Dunno. Mystery.An adult streaked by, with two dependent chicks in tow. I love that the young jacanas look like a completely different and perfectly good species. And it's hard to streak by with six-inch toes. It must be like running in bunny slippers.

Those toes come in very handy when balancing on lotus and lily leaves, spreading the bird's weight like a snowshoe. "Lilytrotter" is a common name for the jacana. I crouched and tried and tried to get a picture of it lifting those fantastic feet so I could show you its toes, but it was in Shuffle mode. If you look closely you can see two of its toetips toward the front of the lotus leaf. Like I said, very long toes.

After that, I tried very hard to get a photo of a jacana in flight, because we are not often given to see birds with chartreuse wings in this life. I finally got an image that makes my heart sing. Tim, Shila, this one's for you, wings, toes and all.