Thursday, May 17, 2012

Today's Bird: Roseate Spoonbill

Today's bird is the Roseate Spoonbill!  It's a Gulf-Coast specialty bird in the summer, but down in South Texas you can see them year round.  Their name is pretty apt: the pretty pink with that big, soup-spoon of a bill.  What they do is bend over and skim through the mud and the muck at the bottom of shallow ponds looking for food.  When you see them in a flock, they'll walk back and forth, sweeping their heads to move their giant bill.  These aren't the first Spoonbills I've seen--the first one I saw in the wild was on a run in a Weslaco Canal.  I knew right away what it was because of the pink feathers.  This flock was hanging out at the deck pond at Estero Llano Grande State Park on May 12, 2012.

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