Florida, Rachel Carson and the Birds

CONNECTIONS

The Pulse and Politics of the Environment, Peace, and Justice

The long, frigid winter and the political climate in Washington has driven me to flee south to Florida, not to Mar-a-Lago, but to visit my wife’s sister, a birder and nature lover, who lives in Clearwater Beach along the Gulf Coast. Later, Caryn and I will head off on our own across Florida, as Rachel Carson did many times for work, for her health, and for respite during the increasingly anti-environmental Eisenhower years.

As I did as a boy, Carson toured the Everglades, went to Marine Land (and wrote a magazine piece about its reopening after the war), visited the Bok Tower Gardens in Lake Wales and looked at wading birds with her friend and colleague, Shirley Briggs, who took pictures.

As I step out into the warm Florida weather and explore a nearby lake and wetlands, a gorgeous Great Egret, unaware that President Trump has eviscerated the Migratory Bird Act of 1918, poses for me, showing off its plumes. It is such beautiful feathers adorning ladies’ hats that led to the slaughter of egrets and other birds by the millions. That is until women organized and mounted the first major American environmental campaign that halted the killing and passed the Migratory Bird Act.

I soon come upon a Great Blue Heron. It looks wilder, more exotic here than do its cousins I pass along the C&O Canal (a favorite haunt of Rachel Carson). As I am soaking up the sun and leaving worries behind me, so, too, is an Anhinga, my first look in years at the “snake bird” whose wings are spread to the sun. After diving for fish, it is carefree, drying out, perhaps showing off for we mortals who stop to admire its slender neck and bill, its black and white feathers that no longer end their days in millinery shops.

Instead, the birds can dance without fear of ending their lives upon a hat. I am looking at one of the most alluring, the small, slim Tricolored Heron (Louisiana Heron for old-timers). Deep shades of blue and indigo with some pink wash and a single, striking ivory feather streaming down its neck. The tricolor hops and jumps and dances in the water to stir up fish for a sumptuous supper. The dance is then joined by the most remarkable dancer of all – a bird I have only seen from afar a few times in my life. A Reddish Egret — looking alternately happy or delirious, nods and bends and hops, even twirls, to some unheard music, mesmerizing fish before it devours them.

At the beach along the Gulf of Mexico, I see fleeting glimpses of dolphins as Brown Pelicans flap by in long lines, and sanderling scurry in the surf, doing their perfect imitations of mechanical, windup toys. I smile, but pause concerned as one has only one leg. I am thinking of Rachel Carson’s notebooks and her concern for a one-legged sanderling she once observed. But I am relieved when miraculously a leg descends, my sanderling is saved. There are only a few other shorebirds here. Ruddy Turnstones peck at small tufts of seaweed, and the plain gray Willets that Rachel Carson described, stand unremarkable until they take off with bold white stripes and raucous cries of “wee-willet, wee-willet.” The other cries that resound above the surf are cackles from the black-headed Laughing Gulls that, when not flying, sit on signs and pose for passersby. The other gull here, but far less common, is the Ring-billed Gull, a slimmer version of a Herring Gull (the big “seagull” of most Eastern beaches) with a black “ring” on its beak and an insatiable curiosity and boldness.

After farewells in Clearwater, Caryn and I drive off to one of the prime birding and natural areas in Florida, the Orlando Wetlands in the town of Christmas. The Orlando Wetlands is designed to reclaim wastewater from the sprawling city of Orlando by naturally filtering it in numerous ponds and ditches and fields that are all accessible on foot. We are barely out of our rental car near the Visitors’ Center when people are talking excitedly about Sandhill Cranes and their “colts.” Whatever colts are, I do not see them, but I do get the best look at the big, gray, red-capped crane I have ever had. This is followed by a closeup of a Limpkin, usually a furtive, even secretive bird that makes the most horrid cries or screams you can imagine. And, in the distance across a large pond, I see a small, rounded island covered with pink dots on the trees. I am gazing at a huge, protected roost of Roseate Spoonbills, the paragon of Florida birds. I am eager to head to the boardwalk that circles the island, but a friendly photographer says she can show us a Barred Owl and her newborn owlets in the far corners of the wetlands. Mother owl is lovely, but the owlets are not visible today. Through binoculars, we watch instead a mother Great Blue Heron feed (or disgorge) a large snake-sized salamander to her two ravenous, almost full-grown teenage herons. They battle, squawking and thrusting at each other and at Mom to get their food.

This somewhat unnerving scene is followed by an encounter that would make bird lovers out of the hardest of hearts. On a quiet stretch of pathway, we again are close to a magnificent Sandhill Crane. It seems alone until a small, golden yellow bird pops out from behind her. It is a colt, our photographer friend explains. The name derives from the very long legs on this tiny bird, like those of a gangly young horse or “colt.” Like the other sandhills we have seen, this colt is not wary and moves slightly in our direction. After a while, mother and colt stroll along calmly in front of us, leading the way down the path.

Birds continue to appear around us in an endless array. A longtime favorite, the Glossy Ibis, peers out from grasses. Another, the primeval, prehistoric-looking Wood Stork, with its bald, black head and black and white, 5-foot wing span, is usually seen flying overhead with legs dangling below. Here, in a sanctuary made of wastewater, we watch it feeding directly at our feet, unfazed by humans. After a lengthy walk, we are on the boardwalk to the spoonbills’ island. Impossible to capture on an I-Phone or even keep in view through our binoculars, birds of all sorts soar and glide around us, beneath us, ahead of us. Roseate Spoonbills, Great Egrets, Snowy Egrets, Wood Storks, Wood Ibises, Tri-Color Herons, Anhingas are on the wing. Common Gallinules and Purple Gallinules are making a racket amidst the lily pads beneath us. In the trees, roosting on nests, often with chicks, are roseates egrets, herons, even Black-bellied Whistling Ducks and Fulvous Tree Ducks.

Exhausted after a full day of walking in the warm sun, we reluctantly leave this heavenly haven for the birds that would not have existed but for women like Harriet Hemenway Rachel Carson, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, and countless others who understood that we humans and the birds share the same scant resources. Caryn and I drive west toward the Tampa airport where we began and stop at a luxurious hotel in Lakeland. It is surrounded by lakes, each with an abundance of birds.

Now the birds of Florida are familiar old friends. We smile at each gallinule, heron, egret, Anhinga. Then, as we are finishing our walk around the lake, on a small wall at the edge of the water, sits a small group of White Pelicans. My last looks at these stunning birds were from an Amtrak train in northern Minnesota, and a small group of them far away and entirely out of place in Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge in Delaware. Here, they are soaked in sun, entirely at ease, unperturbed by people. The largest White Pelican seems to wave its wings at me, perhaps somehow aware that for now at least we humans with binoculars are here to admire pelicans, not pillage there feathers, or ruin their reproduction with chemicals like DDT.

The Audubon Society was started here. President Theordore Roosevelt set aside Florida’s Pelican Island in 1903 as the first federal bird sanctuary ever. And Rachel Carson wrote about what she saw, from the top of Florida to the outermost Keys, in poetic prose that made Americans want to protect and save the birds and every other living thing. Now these Florida birds are in danger again, as environmental protections — from the Migratory Bird Act to the restraints on toxic chemicals, to the efforts to prevent catastrophic climate change – are being recklessly undone.

I head for home rested and refreshed, with renewed determination to work with all those who walk in Rachel Carson’s footsteps and to act boldly to preserve the birds of Florida and the wetlands and wild places that support us all.