Fun Bear Island WMA Visit Highlighted by Encounter with Roseate Spoonbills

Bear Island is a vast wildlife refuge comprising 5,385 acres of protected land and waterways

I photographed and videotaped a "bowl" of Roseate Spoonbills in a shallow canal Sunday, March 10, 2019, deep in the Bear Island Wildlife Management Area. This vast preserve is located about 45 miles south of Charleston in the wonderful ACE Basin.

It was the neatest encounter on a day full of bird activity.  I'll post photos later. Here is the video I took, put together on Kizoa, that runs one minute 15 seconds. Photos follow of this unique creature, other birds and scenes from the special place that is the Bear Island WMA.

Roseate Spoonbills

It's clear where the name spoonbill comes from in this photo

Snowy Egrets- a foursome

A Tricolored Heron and a pair of Mottled Ducks 

A Great Egret and Snowy Egret share a trunk gate used to control water levels in the former rice canals

Two Snowy Egrets and a Tricolored Heron

A Great Egret and a Tricolored Heron- most birds were facing to the right on this day- not sure why, maybe the wind

A treeful of birds- Boat-tailed Grackle is the big one, then a number of Red-winged Blackbirds and also if you look closely there are two European Starlings at the top right side of the frame

A Cormorant perched on a trunk- you can better see the massive wooden structure here

Belted Kingfisher- it can also be seen in the background of the photo two pictures above

I used the Snapseed photo editor HDR tool to make this Owl box photo look more dramatic

I used Snapseed to process most of the photos in this post- but these two I really boosted the high dynamic range (HDR) 

Whatbird.com's identification forum helped me find that these birds on posts are Forster's Terns- and that's a lifer for me!  I posted this photo on whatbird.com's forum and one respondee sent this very useful link that helps differentiate between Common and Forster Terns.  There are Northern Shoveler ducks in the background (left).

Cormorants lined up on a log- I wonder if there's a pecking order here?

The lovely and photogenic Snowy Egret- saw many Snowys during this outing 

A Northern Shoveler pair- whatbird.com helped me with this ID also 

A neat part of this visit was that some normally locked gates were open, allowing us to drive deeper into some sections of the refuge not accessed or seen before. I speculated this was because there had been a hog hunt three days before and some gates had not been closed yet. But another photographer we spoke with said there was a driving tour going on this day.

We spent about three hours at Bear Island. The weather was very nice this mid-March day. Bugs can be bad during this summer but no issues today.  I took some 175 photographs as we encountered such a rich variety of birds in different settings.  We came upon the Roseate Spoonbills toward the end, and that was certainly icing on the cake!

ADDITIONAL PHOTOGRAPHS

American Avocets- the one in the left photo at the top has something, a shrimp I believe

Tricolored Heron

Noticed these paw prints and then a few minutes later spotted what probably made them- raccoons. It stopped and looked at us for a second. This was the best photo I got, as it scurried away.  

Oh yeah, there were some alligators out there.  This big one was on the other side of the canal, thanks goodness!