Although many think this beautiful pink bird is a flamingo, it’s actually a roseate spoonbill. If you take a look at the bottom of the bill, it will help you to understand how it got its name. Shaped like the bowl at the end of a spoon, the end of the slightly opened bill is swept back and forth beneath the water as the rosie wades along seeking a meal. When sensitive nerve endings inside the bill detect a fish, crustacean or aquatic insect, it snaps shut.
The younger birds are usually a very pale pink. It’s not until their third year that they attain the deep pink of the mature bird and the scarlet bands on their wings. And, like the flamingo, the rosie’s beautiful pink color is directly related to its diet. Some of the crustaceans it eats feed on algae that give the spoonbill’s feathers their lovely pink color. In captivity, the birds will “bleach out” even when they’re provided with the same diet they would normally provide for themselves in the wild, so doses of carotene are added to help restore their natural color.
You can see rosies here on Galveston Island most of the year, but they’re in greater abundance during the warm months. Unfortunately you won’t be able to see them on the little “island within an island,” since that has now been renovated out of existence. The ibises, northern shoveler ducks, American coots, common moorhens, red-eared slider turtles and others that shared it with them have had to relocate or be relocated.
It may seem like a small loss, or perhaps no loss at all, since they have been “relocated” (meaning we have removed them from an environment of their own choice, which their instinct told them was ideal, to an environment which we think is “just as good”).
But we can only pat ourselves on the back for “relocating” our wildlife after we have closed down one more safe haven for them. Since this is a small island and there are only a finite number of safe havens (and that number is decreasing daily), eventually we will run out of places to which they can be relocated, and we may discover too late that we have nickeled and dimed our way out of a fortune in wildlife.
