A few shorebirds

Willets, more numerous and yet less conspicuous than when we last saw them on Cape Cod.

Sanderlings. 

Black-necked stilt, one of a pair we saw; only this photo came out halfway decent, but cut my photographer some slack: she was shooting through a chain-link fence.

The point of the spear

Officially, Egretta tricolor is the tri-coloured heron—excuse me, Tricolored Heron for you ABA types—but I prefer the old name of Louisiana heron.

Click to embiggen these photos of Jessa's, and I think you'll agree that "tri-coloured", however you may spell or punctuate the name, sells this bird a bit short.

Caveat passer

Ospreys were not the only birds of prey we saw on and around Grand Isle; as usual, we saw several American kestrels—all sheilas, as it happened, though surely there must have been some spikes around somewhere. 

Also present, an honourary raptor, this loggerhead shrike.

Photos by Jessica Farrell-Churchill. The title translates to "let the sparrow beware".

So early a season

In our prairie garden back home in Nebraska, blanketflower is a star of mid- to late summer; it often blooms well into October. On the dunes of Grand Isle, we found it in riot in mid-March.

Photos, as usual, by Jessa.

Louisiana coast ospreys

The lighting conditions were difficult, but Jessa knows how much I love ospreys, so she did her best to get some photos.

"Are you looking at me?!"

Born on the bayou (or not)

The fellow above was on a canal near Irish Bayou, but we also spent some time with puppy gators at an alligator ranch:

The ranch model is basically as follows: eggs are collected, under permit, from the wild, and the gators raised in captivity, where the survival rate of puppies is much higher than in the wild. A certain percentage are released back into the wild, an uncomplicated process as compared to, say, wild-hacking falcons—the gators can basically be chucked into the water from a boat and left to fend for themselves, though the releases are always done where the eggs were collected in order to prevent artificial mixing of gene pools. Gators not released are harvested for their meat and leather.

This program, instituted in 1978, has been a major component in the recovery of the alligator population in Louisiana, from a low of approximately 100,000 wild gators in the late 1950s to over 2 million today (with another million or so in captivity). More details can be found on the LDWF website.

Limpkins in Louisiana

Come for the seafood, stay to raise a family

Recently Jessa's cousin Rebekah pointed out a bird to me and asked what it was. Its appearance was distinctive, and despite never having seen one before—and despite not having expected to see one here—I was able to immediately identify it as a limpkin. (Does obsessively poring over bird books constitute a misspent youth?)

All of my field guides list Florida as the only place in the U.S. to find limpkins, but they were first seen in Louisiana in Lafourche Parish in 2017, just six years ago. The following year a breeding pair was documented in nearby Terrebonne Parish, and over the next few years reports continued to come in from these coastal parishes, where non-native Pomacea maculata apple snails had made an appearance in the mid-2000s. 

The invasive apple snails, notes non-game ornithologist Robert Dobbs of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, were the key to these reported sightings and especially breeding records. Limpkins may have arrived with a storm, or under their own power, but they almost certainly would have left again without Pomacea:

They wander around naturally. They've wandered up the east coast in the past and around the southeast. Typically, when they show up out-of-range, they eat clams and other mollusks for a while, and then they leave. They generally don't persist in those odd places well outside of their core range. It's possible we had some birds wandering around and they happened upon the Terrebonne-Lafourche area, which is full of apple snails. So why leave? There's a ton of food. The habitat is good. Presumably the climate is okay. They've persisted thus far...

Persisted and spread, apparently. We saw our limpkin—and crucially, heard at least one other—at Irish Bayou in Orleans Parish. Bucks to beignets this ends up being another breeding locality for the newcomers.

A specialist uses specialised tools, and Jessa's photos—these are all hers, by the way—show a gap near the end of the bill, with the mandible tips crossing slightly. (Click to embiggen.) To extract an apple snail from its shell, the limpkin removes the operculum and extracts the snail with the forceps-like tip of the bill; when feeding on bivalves, the limpkin uses scissoring movements of the bill tip to sever the adductor muscles.

Even with these adaptations, however, limpkins are not a panacea for Louisiana's Pomacea problem. (P. maculata threatens both agricultural crops and native vegetation, and competes with crawfish as well as native snails). Robert Dobbs again:

At this point, there aren't enough limpkins to make much of an impact on the apple snail population. But if this trend continues and limpkins really do become established, it's possible that they could provide some level of bio control.

Meanwhile, birdwatchers such as ourselves can enjoy this recent addition to Louisiana's avifauna and the wild calls they add to the soundscape of the wetlands.