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Submit a Spoonbill Sighting
Like the canary in a coal mine, Roseate Spoonbills are letting us know that there is something drastically wrong with our environment, and continued runaway development will not only ruin our remaining natural areas but our lifestyles as well. However, this pink canary is still healthy enough to recover and the hope is that Everglades restoration efforts will reverse the downward trend. For this reason, spoonbills have been widely accepted as a key indicator species by which the health of Florida Bay and the greater Everglades landscape will be gauged. In a new program in cooperation with the United States Geological Survey and Everglades National Park, Dr. Jerry Lorenz and staff at Audubon's Tavernier Science Center, have begun a banding program to monitor the progress of spoonbills nesting throughout Florida.

If you have sighted a banded Spoonbill and wish to contribute information, use the "Submit Sightings!" button to submit a brief report.

While we appreciate your observation of all Spoonbills, please submit a sighting report only if you have observed a BANDED Spoonbill.

Spoonbills and Audubon's Work in Florida Bay
At the turn of the century, the plume hunting industry in Florida nearly extirpated the huge populations of wading birds that were associated with the Everglades. Among the casualties was one of Florida's most identifiable and beloved bird species: the Roseate Spoonbill. By 1935, it was believed that Florida's spoonbill breeding population had been reduced to only 5 nests on Bottle Key in Florida Bay. At that time, the National Audubon Society took on the task of, not only protecting these birds, but also finding out why numbers remained so low more than 30 years after the plume trade was halted.

Robert Porter Allen, Audubon's first research director, took it upon himself to uncover the spoonbill's secrets, thereby beginning Audubon's 70-year tradition of studying Florida Bay in general and spoonbills in particular. A dedicated collection of talented and colorful Audubon researchers followed in Bob Allen's wake. Dr. Jerry Lorenz, a trained fisheries biologist, is the most recent Audubon scientist to pick up the spoonbill standard. Dr. Lorenz has combined information from Audubon's extensive database on spoonbill nesting patterns with his personal experience in studying the fish on which spoonbills feed, thereby constructing a story of how the human population explosion in southern Florida has had a multilevel effect on spoonbills. During the development boom, seemingly unrelated events serially reduced the spoonbill's foraging habitats in domino like fashion resulting in a dramatic decline in spoonbill nesting success that continues today. Dr. Lorenz has demonstrated how the destruction of wetlands for urban and agricultural use have not only endangered spoonbills, but a myriad of other creatures and entire ecosystems. Ecosystems that drive our tourist based economy.

Nesting Ecology of Roseate Spoonbills in Florida Bay
Audubon's Estuarine Research Project takes a multi-level approach to examining how water management practices are affecting Roseate Spoonbills and Florida Bay. At the most basic level, the project examines the effect of water releases on coastal hydrology. This information is then used to evaluate how submerged plants respond to different hydrologic conditions. These plants serve as both habitat and food base for the next tier in the food chain: the small fish that are ubiquitous throughout the Everglades/Florida Bay landscape. At the top most level, the project looks at how Roseate Spoonbills respond to the dynamic relationship between fish and hydrology. By examining these linkages, the project attempts to connect how water management is affecting the myriad predators that rely on these fish as their primary food resource.

Research performed over the last 15 years has demonstrated that the success of spoonbill nesting efforts in Florida Bay are dependent upon natural cycles in prey fish abundance that coincide with the wet/dry seasonal cycle of southern Florida (Figure 1).

The stereotypic cycle begins with the onset of the wet season in May or June of each year dependent on the high water levels that occur during the wet season (Figure 1, Panel 1). The longer the wet- season, the more generations these little fish can go though, thereby increasing numbers exponentially. Furthermore, longer wet seasons enable additional time for fish growth so the prey are actually bigger and higher water levels mean more three dimensional space which promotes fish production. The wet season also means greater freshwater flow from the Everglades into Florida Bay thereby lower the saltiness (or salinity) on the spoonbill's foraging ground. Lower salinity promotes a prey base community that is larger and more robust than if the salinity were higher. If water managers significantly disrupt the quantity or distribution of water deliveries, such that the effects of the wet season are negatively affected than the prey base will be too small to support spoonbill reproduction.

During the dry season, water levels recede and the fish begin to concentrate in increasing greater numbers as the wetted area on the foraging grounds shrinks (Figure 1, Panel 2-4). This makes the prey more available to spoonbills (and other predators including other wading birds, game fish and reptiles). As a result spoonbills time their reproduction with the dry season. If water managers disrupt the natural timing of this drying down process by pumping unwanted water onto the spoonbills foraging habitat than a "reversal" occurs (Figure 1, Panel 1). Reversals raise water levels so that the concentrated prey spread out across the landscape and are much harder to capture. If this happens for even a few days, adult spoonbills will not get enough food to sustain their chicks. The tragic result is that the chicks starve to death in their nests and the reproduction fails.

Although this paradigm is widely accepted, much of the supporting information is circumstantial. Testing these hypotheses within a true experimental design is neither practical nor feasible given the environmental, logistical, and political constraints for manipulating water levels over such a vast expanse of land. However, variation of hydrologic conditions among years and locations is virtual certainty. Consequently, we can treat this variation as a natural experiment. The specific hypotheses to be tested are outlined in Table 1. These hypotheses include both predictions about prey fish and spoonbill nesting success. The prey fish will continue to studied as part of the Estuarine Research Project. The spoonbill banding program was initiated so as to be able to follow the success of spoonbill chicks beyond their earliest nesting phases.