Ray UR What is Next

 At the beginning of my four month semester I struggled to pick a topic for my independent research project. I am a believer in climate change and I thought that it would be best to choose a subject directly related to the issue. Although, throughout my time in the park service I always wanted to take the time and research this one interesting pink bird, the Roseate Spoonbill. When I chose to research the bird for my project it didn't seem nearly as important as my other classmates topics like, sea level rise or micro-plastics. Until I started my research and found that this particular pink bird has only been researched by a handful of other people. Since it was difficult finding information on the mysterious life of this unique bird, I thought it would be best to reach out to the professionals at the Audubon Society. One researcher, Peter Frezza, has also taken particular interest in the Roseate Spoonbill. Peter works down in the everglades, which provides very important nesting habitat for these birds. He agreed that they are making movements north, and even mentioned a friend seeing them as far as South Carolina. Considering that I wanted to see exactly how far north Spoonbills were going in the winter months, he suggested I use the Audubon Society's Christmas Bird Count database. The bird count will tell me how many times my bird has been sited in a particular location each year during the same time of year. However, the surveyors are human, so only the birds that can be seen are recorded. Some years will have missing data, mostly due to the lack of volunteers for that year.

*Graph is based off results in the Audubon Christmas Bird Count database found at; http://netapp.audubon.org/CBCObservation/Historical/ResultsBySpecies.aspx?1

•In the year 2015 a notable amount of Roseate Spoonbills were surveyed north of their historic distribution range during the winter season. 

•The resulting steady presence of Roseate Spoonbills being seen as far as Ace Basin, SC in the winter months surpassed my expectations of their northern dispersal.

 Now that I know that Roseate Spoonbills are dispersing further north in the winter months I would like to know why, and so would many other bird experts. The first hunch that I had, and many people have, is that this is some sort of result from climate change. Roseate Spoonbills are a neo-tropical bird species (Dumas 2000). However, South Carolina has cold winters and nearly had record breaking snowfall this past January. Click here to see news article. That is extremely harsh weather for a Roseate Spoonbill to be tolerating. I would like to know what they are seeking this far north, and why they have returned over the past four years. I am going find information on their foraging requirements and see there is a particular food source that is now being found in marsh habitats further north. I would also like discover if their is any sort of mention of the Roseate Spoonbills abundance in the 18th centaury, before they were hunted to near extinction in the plume-era trade of the late 19th century.  I wonder if their populations are returning to what they were before being hunted, and if this rebound is having an effect on their post nesting season dispersal.

More research to come!

Dumas, J. V.. 2000. Roseate Spoonbill (Platalea ajaja), version 2.0. In The Birds of North America (A. F. Poole and F. B. Gill, Editors). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.2173/bna.490