Rare spoonbill visits Alabama, sporting feathers once worth more than gold (2024)

Staring at a roseate spoonbill feeding in a pond on a south Alabama farm, its plumage the gentle pink of a ballerina's toe shoe, it is easy to understand why the birds were hunted almost to the point of extinction.

But it is also a shame, for spoonbills were once fairly common visitors in Alabama, Louisiana, and across the south. Today, the mere sighting of a spoonbill along much of the Gulf Coast is cause for celebration.

Like a number of particularly flamboyant Gulf Coast bird species, the spoonbill was hunted solely for its feathers, which were used to decorate ladies' hats during the Victorian era. Their almost total disappearance by the tail end of the 1800s was one of the factors that ultimately led to the creation of the Audubon Society, and to the organization's annual Christmas Bird Count, which begins in a few weeks.

Look for information about spoonbill sightings in Alabama back in the 1800s, and the closest thing you'll find is a historical reference that mentions the killing of roseate spoonbills on Dauphin Island in 1897. Another reference mentions a stuffed spoonbill purchased in Bayou La Batre. The common theme: dead spoonbills.

The spoonbill's feathers were a hot commodity for hat makers on both sides of the Atlantic beginning in about the 1850s. The flamingo is the only North American bird that can come close to the spoonbill's audacious display of pink. But not even the flamingo with its famously crooked beak can hold a candle to the spoonbill in the weird bill department.

The first time you lay eyes on a spoonbill, it is immediately clear where the name comes from. The bird sports a perfect, slightly oval-shaped spoon on the end of its bill. It uses its broad snout for prospecting around in the shallows, catching fish, crustaceans, and bug larvae.

That's what a spoonbill seen south of Fairhope a few days ago was doing, swinging its spoon back and forth in the grassy shallows of Lynn and John Oldshue's farm pond, occasionally snapping it shut on a minnow. It arrived with several wood storks, another fairly rare visitor to Alabama.

"Its always exciting to have a spoonbill around here. We don't see them every day and they are a really spectacular bird," said Roger Clay, a wild bird biologist with the Alabama Division of Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries. "It's just a few times a year we hear of one passing through. There are breeding populations left in south Florida and southwestern Louisiana into Texas. We are between those areas, and we get some movement between those areas. Never any big numbers, just a solitary bird."

But it wasn't always so. When John Audubon visited the Gulf states in in 1820, he wrote of encountering great flocks of spoonbills along the coast. He also noted that "the feathers of the wings and tail of the roseate spoonbill are manufactured into fans," for sale to tourists in St. Augustine, Florida, and that "these ornaments form in some degree a regular article of trade."

The fact that there were enough spoonbills to feed such a tourist market is a testament to how common they once were. But within the next 50 years, the birds would virtually disappear from the coast. At one point, there were less than 100 pairs of spoonbills left, according to historical records. Today, biologists believe there are close to 1,000 breeding pairs of spoonbills in Florida, an improvement but still just a tiny fraction of the original population.

The stunning declines among coastal birds did not escape the attention of scientists of the day. Frank Chapman, curator of the bird collection at New York's American Museum of Natural History for decades, beginning in 1888, wrote of the decline even then. Often, he made his case by comparing his observations at a location with those of ornithologists who had visited in the past.

For instance, in his 1908 book, Camps and Cruises of an Ornithologist, he describes the observations made by Dr. Henry Bryant in 1858 after visiting Pelican Island, "the most extensive breeding place" in Florida. "Breeding in company with the pelicans were thousands of herons, Peale's egret, the rufous egret and little white egret, with a few pairs of the great blue heron and roseate spoonbills; and immense numbers of Man-of-War birds and white ibises," wrote Bryan. Visiting decades later, Chapman found, "Of the birds mentioned by Dr. Bryant, the pelican alone remains."

The other species -- the herons, ibis, spoonsbills and other birds with exotic feathers - had been wiped out entirely. By 1881, spoonbill rookeries around Tampa Bay that had been thousands of birds strong, were totally empty and would remain so for the next 100 years.

All of those species are colonial nesters, known for gathering in groups of hundreds or thousands of birds and making their nests almost on top of one another. Often, the colonies include multiple species of birds, herons next to ibises, next to egrets, pelicans and gulls. The adults are reluctant to leave their eggs or young. Gathered in such huge crowds, they made easy targets for the plume hunters.

"They were driven away by that curse of Florida, irresponsible, gun-bearing tourists. Landing on the island, they shot the inhabitants in large numbers and left them to rot in the mud," Chapman wrote, lamenting that state officials had allowed "northern milliners to loot her of her treasures... the few thousands paid the plumers is a pitiful sum when once considers the real value of what has been irretrievably lost."

For Chapman, what had been lost were wild places, "once animated by snowy plumaged herons, ibises and by roseate spoonbills." On finding a small and remote location on Cuthbert Island where some of these birds were still nesting in the 1880s, Chapman wrote, "It is not improbable that the last snowy egret and roseate spoonbill of Florida will be shot at this point."

At the time, feathers from spoonbills and herons were worth more than gold. Plume feathers were bringing $32 an ounce, compared to just $20 per ounce for gold in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Herbert Job, an ornithologist and writer working in the 1800s, campaigned against the slaughter going on along the Gulf Coast, and calculated the cost in terms of birds. His original work is quoted in the wonderful book, The Birder's Handbook - A Field Guide to the Natural History of North American Birds. The handbook quotes Job directly, reporting that a single London auction house sold 48,240 ounces of plume feathers from various American birds in 1902. Job calculated that it took four birds to yield an ounce of plumes, or 64 dead shore birds per pound of plume feathers.

"These sales meant 192,960 herons killed at their nests, and from two to three times that number of young or eggs destroyed," wrote Job. "Is it, then, any wonder that these species are on the verge of extinction?"

The feathers from the 192,960 dead birds, at $32 an ounce, were worth $1.5 million in 1902, the equivalent of $43 million today. Remember, those records are from a single auction house. Feathers from the Gulf states were sold all over the world at the time.

Something of a turning point for the nation's bird population occurred in 1886, when Chapman, one of the nation's leading bird experts at the time, took two famous walks on the streets around his New York City museum office. During those walks, he counted 700 women wearing hats. Three out of four hats had bird feathers or entire birds on them. He counted 40 species of birds.

In addition to hats adorned with feathers from herons, rails and other wading birds, there were also hats with waxwings, warblers, bluebirds, woodpeckers, gulls, and dozens of other species. There were even 16 hats with bobwhite quail on them. News of Chapman's hat survey and the slaughter behind it riled bird lovers, in particular a group of Massachusetts women who would go on to found the original chapter of the Audubon society.

Chapman, who died in 1945, did not live to see roseate spoonbills and other species that were hunted for their plumes begin to rebound. But he played a critical role in preventing their extinction. For instance, he lobbied President Theodore Roosevelt to protect Pelican Island, the Florida rookery that had lost its spoonbills and herons. Roosevelt did, creating the nation's first wildlife sanctuary, and establishing the model for National Wildlife Refuge system.

Aside from drawing attention to the toll being wreaked on bird populations by the Victorian hat industry, Chapman's most lasting act was one of creation. In December of 1900, Chapman proposed the idea of starting a Christmas Bird Count. At that time, many Americans participated in "side hunts" on Christmas Day, making a sport of seeing who could kill the most birds. Often, the carcasses were just left where they fell. Chapman suggested that instead of killing birds on Christmas, perhaps it would be more fun to count them.

That first Christmas bird count of 1900 included 25 people. By 2014, the Christmas Bird Count relied on observations from 71,659 volunteers, and tallied 66 million birds. The data collected are used by scientists and government agencies to monitor bird populations.

To participate in the 2015 Christmas Bird Count, which is held between Dec. 14 and Jan. 5, visit Audubon.org. You can also visit the Mobile Bay Audubon Society, or the Birmingham Audubon Society.

Ben Raines explores Alabama's natural wonders for Al.com. Follow him on Facebook, or Twitter at Ben H. Raines. Shoot him an email with questions or story ideas atbraines@al.com.