Normally when you go looking for something like I did when I decided to go to Texas and photograph Roseate Spoonbills, you do a little research. You ask around among people who have recently been there. You check the forums online for postings of your quarry, you check in with the naturalists at the very bird refuges you plan to shoot at, and you do everything else you can to even the odds a little.

The first problem comes in when you get there and there are no Roseate Spoonbills. The second problem starts when you begin hearing phrases like “Yeah I was out there a few days ago and there were tons and tons of them.” Now an adult Roseate Spoonbill weighs in at approximately 4 lbs. fully feathered so that means you get about 500 to the ton. And tons usually means around three tons. So we’re talking maybe 1500 bright pink 28 – 32″ long birds with great big flat round bills that squawk like a bullfrog that just heard his first frog in a blender joke, and are supposedly just “out there”. I’m thinking that would be kind of hard to miss.

Instead, because you’ve just driven over 2000 miles to photograph these birds, what you find is one solitary bird standing in a ditch by the road and by the time you get your rig shut down and your camera ready he’s long gone to meet up with the other 1500 birds that are now 30 miles from where you are. And he wasn’t even fully pink.

Days go by. You work diligently following up on rumors and sightings and hunches and the old “Oh what the hell, lets look over there” style of research, with not even one more sighting of one Roseate Spoonbill. Your deadline is fast approaching for when you have to call it quits and shut down this operation so you can head for home and you’re getting desperate. This is when you begin to think of options like buying a chicken and painting it pink. If you fuzz up the image a little and have it stretch its neck out some and get it to stand in some really shallow water, you can probably add the spoon part of the bill in Photoshop later, who’s going to know. Desperation makes you, well, desperate and you’ll try nearly anything, just please, please don’t let me get skunked and not shoot one for real.

But then because you must have done something right in another life, and miracle of miracles, you find yourself on the last day, in the last place there could possibly be any birds. You’re walking that last frustrating walk out to the end of the pier and there in the lee of the reeds in perfectly flat, mirror-like water so you get perfect reflections, in the very last of the failing light, you find Spoonbills. Not the 1500 you were taunted with but nine of them. Nine. But nine is enough. Turns out that most people who actually do see Spoonbills in this area at this time of year only see them in onesie’s and twosie’s and if they’re real lucky three or four. So nine is good.

There’s about twenty minutes of workable light left before it goes full dark so there is no time to fool around. If you want to see them, do it through your viewfinder, but get busy and work the shutter. And because this is a perfect ending kind of story the birds hang around posing until the very last moment when the sun goes completely down below the horizon before they lift off in unison for parts unknown. A perfect end to a now perfect day.

Some experienced birders who actually know what they’re doing say that there ARE large flocks where there are “tons and tons” of them but that’s over in Florida and another 1000 miles from where I am. And yeah I would be considered lucky to see as many as four in a flock. So I didn’t do too bad for a first timer shooting the elusive Spoonbills down on the Gulf coast.