Roseate Spoonbill

In his 1942 monograph The Roseate Spoonbill, conservationist Robert Porter Allen wrote: “The Spoonbill exhibits paradoxical glamour and drollery.” Decades later, modern field guide author Kenn Kaufman had a similar take: “Roseate Spoonbills are gorgeous at a distance and bizarre up close.”
Often seen in the company of other wading birds, such as the Great Egret, Reddish Egret, and White Ibis, the Roseate Spoonbill truly stands out. With its pink body, crimson shoulder feathers, and orangey tail, this is the most colorful wading bird nesting in the U.S. Understandably, distant spoonbills are frequently mistaken for flamingos, which show up only rarely in the U.S. Closer observation reveals this species’ lead-colored head and wide-tipped spatulate bill.
What types of meals does this unusual wading bird score with its utensil-shaped bill?
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Video clips by Larry Arbanas/Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (481365 and 481375)
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-Raised with a Silver Spoon(bill)-
The utility of the spoonbill’s odd apparatus becomes clear when this bird is in action, feeding. This is when, often in small groups, spoonbills stalk the shallows, bills submerged and heads waving side to side. Beneath the water, the birds’ slightly open salad-tong-like bill tips swing back and forth, clamping down on contacted prey. Much of what’s on the menu is small fish such as minnows and a wide variety of aquatic invertebrates including crustaceans (crayfish, small crabs, shrimp), insects, and mollusks. Some plant matter is also eaten.
Although it may look cumbersome, this rosy wader’s bill deftly performs necessary tasks just as well as those of other species. Like other birds, for example, spoonbills preen, and during courtship, pairs pass sticks to each other and cross bills, rituals that strengthen the pair bond. The bill is also used to gather sticks, twigs, and leaves for the nest.
-Spooning the Globe-
The Roseate Spoonbill is the “spoonbill of the Americas.” There are five other spoonbill species in the world, all of them white-plumaged. They occur in Eurasia, Africa, and on Australia, New Zealand, and some other islands in Oceania. Fossil records of spoonbills date as far back as around 50 million years ago.
The Roseate Spoonbill is found from the southeastern U.S. to central Argentina. It is a rather scarce nester along the coasts of Mexico, Central America, and parts of the Caribbean, including Cuba. This bird is also found in many low, watery regions in South America, mainly east of the Andes. In fact, the Roseate Spoonbill gets its species name ajaja from the Indigenous Tupi language of upper Amazonia.
In the U.S., approximately 3,000 pairs nest in Texas; about 1,500 in Louisiana, and 1,100 in Florida. Pale-pink first-year birds constitute most of the long-distance wanderers that turn up far outside the species’ breeding range each year. In recent years, extralimital sightings in the U.S. seem to have become more frequent, including first-record birds in Maine and Minnesota in 2018. This summer was particularly exciting for birders seeking out-of-range spoonbills, including some first state records. Among other places, birds turned up in Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Michigan, New York, and Virginia.
Post-breeding dispersal into the Carolinas and Georgia and around the Gulf of Mexico is now commonplace, in some cases leading to nesting. First modern-era nesting records came from Mississippi in 2004, Georgia in 2011, and South Carolina in 2019.
In general, the Roseate Spoonbill is a rather silent species. On its breeding grounds, and sometimes while feeding, it can be heard uttering a low, almost chuckling series of grunts, on the same pitch.
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