Update from the Everglades: February 16, 2014

In my February 4th update I noted that I'd seen about 6000 wading birds in WCA-3A, probably the most I'd ever seen in this area. Since then, we had a day of pretty heavy rainfall and water levels have risen a few inches. This so called 'reversal' from falling to rising water levels is usually a bad thing for birds because the fish and other prey animals that become concentrated in drying pools when the landscape is drying - and hence become easy pickings for the birds - are able to re-disperse back into the marsh once water levels rise again. So I was pretty shocked this week to find not 6000 birds but over 21,000! And what a sight it was…some of the flocks were enormous (I couldn't count them accurately but some contained over 3000 birds) and the birds were literally exploding from the dense vegetation as we flew towards them. The majority of the birds were white or glossy ibises, but there was a good sprinkling of spoonbills and smaller herons/egrets to give a splash of color (see photo below). Again, I didn't see many Wood Storks (as expected) but this strong foraging response from the white ibises leads me to think that their nesting might be good this year (nesting effort is usually positively associated with numbers of foraging birds).