Admiring rookery birds at St. Augustine

I drove down to St. Augustine, Florida, last month for the annual Birding and Photo Fest. These are some of my pictures of the remarkable creatures there, including great egrets, roseate spoonbills, tricolored herons, ibises, snowy egrets, and wood storks. It was a privilege to spend some time with them as they went about their business of finding food, repairing nests, mating, incubating eggs, and feeding chicks.
It took me over eight hours to get there, including lunch, gas, a couple of wrong turns, construction zones, and near the end, rush hour traffic. But I was glad to find I could still handle such a long drive by myself. I listened to several podcasts, and finished an audio course on Mozart.

I stayed in the Holiday Inn Express just across the bridge from old St. Augustine and convenient to the Fest activities. It was like other HIE’s – simple but bright and fairly clean – but it had one real problem: extremely thin walls, and when I was there, noisy guests. There was a group of teenage boys and dads around my room, which I guessed to be some sports team. They chatted, laughed, and argued almost all night.
I considered complaining either directly or via management, but they kept the noise just under the threshold of criminality. My premium ear plugs, effective against most noise, were no match for them, and I had a terrible night’s sleep.

Before sunrise the next morning, I was heading toward the St. Augustine Municipal Marina for a boat tour of the harbor area. The tour, by Eco Tours and led by Zack, focused on the bird life in the area. We didn’t spot any rarities, but it was fun to be on the water with the animals. A highlight was swimming manatees.

That afternoon I went to the first of several talks I’d pre-registered for about birds and photography. This one was by Jack Rogers, and concerned identifying shorebirds and getting good pictures of them. Rogers shared a lot of good tips, including other locations to check out in Florida.
Afterwards, I looked over the stalls in the main hall which were selling photographic equipment and promoting photography workshops and tours. I sat down with a fellow dealing in used camera equipment, and sold him one of my old lenses, a tripod ball head, and a macro rail I wasn’t using. I was happy to get the closet a little cleaned out, and add some cash to the wallet.

Then I drove to the Alligator Farm. The place is essentially a zoo featuring a lot of alligators and crocodiles from all over the world, but in the spring it becomes a rookery. A lot of large wading birds, including great egrets, snowy egrets, wood storks, herons, and roseate spoonbills, build their nests there and start new families.

A board walk above many alligators curves through trees, and the birds build their nests in those trees. Some nests are almost close enough to reach out and touch, and others not much farther. The birds sit on eggs, or feed the hatchlings, and fly back and forth to get new twigs for their nests. At times it’s relaxed and peaceful, but their are also unhappy hungry fledglings, squabbles between neighbors, and mating rituals between partners.

The birds come back to the Alligator Farm every year. I was told that they like building nests above the alligators, because the gators protect them from predators. This seems plausible. I saw birds drinking water and looking for new twigs quite close to alligators. I would guess that the birds keep a wary eye out, and the alligators realize that it’s quite hard without an element of surprise to catch an experienced adult shore bird.

I went to several more classes on photographic techniques, and came back repeatedly to the Alligator Farm. At one point, a roseate spoonbill (large pink bird with a bill shaped like a shovel) flew onto the boardwalk right at my feet to fetch a twig for its nest. A few minutes later it flew back to the railing, looked me over carefully, then dropped down again in front of me to get another twig.

Most of the time the alligators weren’t doing much, other than lying, walking, and swimming, but I did see a presentation by a young woman who stood in an area with them. She gave some fun facts and debunked some myths, such as the notion that alligators can run fast. Plainly, since she didn’t get eaten, they weren’t simply mindless, ruthless maneaters. She called some of them by name and described their personalities, and they opened up their mouths as she threw them a fish. They’re probably smarter than we’ve thought.

That seems to be true of most animals. I just finished reading The Creative Lives of Animals, by Carol Gigliotti. Gigliotti collects research on the creative activities of various species, like nest building of birds, tool use by chimpanzees, and problem solving abilities of octopuses. She shows that many animals learn from each other and their own experience, and experience emotions, like joy and sorrow, similar to ours.

The idea of animals as creative individuals and communities runs contrary to what I was taught, which was to consider them as mindless automatons, controlled in all respects by blind instinct. And that older paradigm is still widespread. There’s still so much we don’t know about their lives. For example, we know they communicate in many different ways, but we understand very few of their signals.

But we’re starting to learn, and to realize how much more there is to know. The more time I spend close to animals, the more certain I am that they are complex individuals, with personalities, problem-solving abilities, and joys and sorrows. They can inspire us with their beauty, athleticism, and fortitude. Also, they can be pretty funny.
