Yesterday I decided to take a hike on one of the wetland trails on the Aquarium property here on the coast in North Carolina when I was surprised by a rare sighting of a very interesting bird.
The SpoonBill. note, the bill is a spoon!!
Naturally, I became curious about the adaptive features of this beautiful bird. Namely, it’s pink color, and it’s ridiculously shaped bill. So lets explore this together.
spoonbills are in the same family with ibises. These birds are known for their long legs, large wingspan, and wading for feeding. Biologically, they are both distantly related to Pelicans but lack the webbed feet. In North Carolina it is rare to see this species of bird as we are just outside of it’s northern range. It is believed that SpoonBill populations will tend to move northerly with climate change affect on marshland habitats in the south.
THE SPOON
As a novice birder I do know that you can tell a lot about a bird by the shape of its bill. Particularly, you can determine what types of foods it eats. For example, birds of prey have a hooked bill for tearing apart the flesh of their prey, seed eating birds have a “nut cracking” thick bill, well, for nut cracking, and some of the coastal birds that search for food in the depths of the sand have long thin bills for piercing and searching in the soft substrates where they find aquatic insects. With out much knowledge of the SpoonBill I imagine this bird must use it’s bill similar to a duck but the spoon is so dramatically wide!!
With further research I discovered the SpoonBill’s nostrils are at the base of the bill allowing it to fully submerge the bill in the water to feed. While feeding it is searching for small aquatic creatures and sifts its bill from side to side. The spoon shape is successful because it covers more area! They are known to eat fish, small shrimp, crayfish, crabs, insects, and even slugs!
During the winter all the SpoonBills travel south to nest in ridiculously large bright pink colonies!! They are believed to be monogamous. The pink color is thought to result from their diet of pink colored shrimp. Evidently, the carotenoid pigments in the shrimp transfer directly to the feathers. The pink color intensifies as the birds become adults. Mo’ shrimps Mo’ pinks This also occurs in Flamingos!