This week on WATERWAYS:

Wading Birds of the Everglades,

and Benthic studies.

There are over 360 species of birds that spend

at least part of the year in Everglades National Park.

Some are shorebirds.

Some are raptors.

And some are wading birds.

Blue heron.

Snowy egret.

Roseate spoonbill.

Everglades National Park is a part-time home

to sixteen species of wading birds.

There are some amazing views of wading birds

in the Everglades.

In Florida Bay, what I think is the most striking thing is

this broad expansive, beautiful water,

the most scenic natural conditions ever

and just hundreds of wading birds.

Everglades National Park - a World Heritage Site,

an International Biosphere Reserve, and a Wetland of

International Importance - protects the

largest subtropical wilderness in the United States,

and is considered to be the most significant breeding grounds

for tropical wading birds in North America.

Because Everglades National Park was established

for its flora and fauna, its wildlife primarily,

which was the first park that was established

for that explicit purpose.

I mean, you know, there's no grand vistas

in Everglades National Park.

You know, there's no mountains, no grand canyons,

none of that.

But what there was, was these huge numbers

of flocks of wading birds.

And so, I think the Service understood the need to monitor

that, because the numbers had already started

to decline and they knew that.

The story of wading birds in the Everglades

is a story of bounty, decimation and rebirth.

It is a conservation success story with caveats,

and a lesson in ecology and hydrology.

While we don't know how many wading birds existed

in the Everglades prior to the arrival of Europeans,

some experts have estimated as many as 2.5 million.

But, by the early 1900s, it was a different story.

The once-abundant wading bird population

was decimated by a feather fashion frenzy,

as well as the encroachment into their habitat.

So disturbing was the slaughter of these birds and

the destruction of their habitat by plume hunters

that the state of Florida instituted

a ban on plume hunting in 1900.

In 1902 the Audubon Society in Monroe County hired

Guy Bradley to protect wading birds

and to arrest violators of the ban.

A mere three years later, he was shot and killed while

attempting to arrest a well-known plume hunter for

killing egrets on Cape Sable.

Further protection came with the advent of wildlife

refuges, such as Pelican Island and Key West National

Wildlife Refuge, specifically set aside to protect

a colony of nesting birds.

By the time Everglades National Park was established

in 1947, wading bird numbers were down

to about three hundred and fifty thousand

- by the 1980s, they numbered even less.

But in more recent years, wading bird

populations have begun to rebound.

Wading birds are, have shown definite improvements

in the number of birds in the system,

utilizing the system, and the number of

birds nesting in the system.

So, that's a vast improvement over what

it was ten years ago.

Is it anything like what it was historically?

No!

Will it ever be like that?

Probably not.

But it's certainly an improvement over what it was

when, you know, wading birds in the, within the confines of

Everglades National Park were probably, you know, maybe 3 or

4 percent of what they were historically.

Spend a few minutes in the Everglades really looking,

watching the wading birds and their unique behavior.

Each has their own dance, their own strut; each hunting

method a little different.

There are tactile feeding birds like the white ibis,

wood storks and roseate spoonbills, and there are

visual predators like egrets and herons.

The reddish egret abandons the stately nature of most other

egrets by clumsily running around in shallow water

scaring its prey from hiding places;

plucking them from the water;

or the ibis that uses its long, curved bill to probe

the mud to capture insects and small fish along shorelines

and shallows; or the great egret that gracefully and

patiently stalks its prey, and, like a bolt of lightning,

pierces the water snaring its meal.

Can't tell an egret from a heron?

Or a heron from a, heron?

The great egret and the snowy egret look similar.

But, a great egret has a yellow-orange beak

and the all black legs.

The snowy egret has an all black beak

and black legs with yellow feet.

You may find another white wading bird, often mistakenly

called a great white heron.

This is actually the great blue heron in a "white morph".

Through genetic work, ornithologists no longer

consider the great white heron to be a distinct species.

Another heron often seen in the Everglades is the

tri-colored heron.

A tri-colored heron has a white belly whereas

a little blue heron does not.

Probably the wading bird that people most

often want to see in the Everglades

is wood storks .

And they're the only North American stork; they're big.

They have these great big sort of ugly flinty heads

and a very unique habit of foraging.

Wood storks, they're once again a Florida specialty.

They do occur in other areas and they are expanding up into

the southeastern U.S.

Georgia, even North and South Carolina they occur now.

But, they are something that you are most likely to see

still in the Everglades.

They're striking, being a large, fairly large wading bird.

The most notable thing about them is when you get up close,

the first thing people usually say is: "Haaa, that's an ugly

wading bird!"

They do have a, I guess, an unpleasant look to their skin

on their head usually a bare head and neck; it's sort of

blackish and almost woody-looking color.

But they also have a white body and the trailing edge of

their wing is beautiful black iridescent feathers.

Another must see, of course, is the Roseate Spoonbill

because they are absolutely gorgeous and many

times of the year they are in breeding plumage in the

Everglades and they have this beautiful flame/orange colored

feathers that's just unforgettable.

Snowy egrets are very commonly looked-after just because

they're active and they have beautiful plumes, little white

bird and very pugnacious, as well.

Visit Snake Bight in Everglades National Park

and you just might get a chance to see

some of these wading birds in action.

You might even see a flamingo or two!

During the 1800s, large flocks of flamingos could be found in

the Snake Bight area of Florida Bay, but the birds

were relentlessly hunted for their meat, and all but

disappeared after 1902.

Today, individual flamingos or small flocks,

presumably from the Bahamas and Caribbean,

are occasionally spotted in the area.

The status of many of these wading bird

species is precarious.

Roseate spoonbills are listed as federally threatened; wood

storks are listed as endangered.

And, all other wading birds have protected status within

the state of Florida.The health of wading bird

populations in Everglades National Park reflects the

health of the Everglades.

To monitor the health of the ecosystem, park staff have

been tracking wading bird nesting populations using

fixed-wing aircraft.

Lori Oberhofer is a biologist with Everglades National Park.

Between February and May, for 3 to 4 days a month and for 6

to 8 hours a day, she crisscrosses the park taking

photographs of any wading bird nesting colonies she sees.

Covering almost one point five million acres,

Lori's flights take her across vast sawgrass prairies,

cypress strands, mangrove coastlines

and muck-filled swamps.

This monitoring project has been conducted

every year since 1985.

We have almost a pure record going back to the 1940s.

And the longer we continue monitoring these colonies,

the more important this data becomes.

We can see long-term trends over time.

We're seeing some interesting trends now with how the

colonies are moving into areas where they historically nested.

Lori and her team are primarily concerned with

the locations of the colonies and the species

identification; but data collected on estimated sizes

of those colonies, as well as data collected from areas

surrounding the park, is proving to be equally important.

We have a comprehensive program that counts

birds from the Florida Keys through the central

Everglades and then into Lake Okeechobee.

So we have a very good handle on where birds are at any time

in the breeding season and how their numbers are

comparing with any previous year.

Plume hunters were not the only reason

wading bird populations declined.

Early flood control measures and ensuring south Florida had

an adequate water supply for its growing population

also played a hand.

It's the goal of the Comprehensive Everglades

Restoration Plan, or CERP, to mitigate some of the adverse

effects of these past water management actions by

capturing fresh water that flows to the Atlantic Ocean

and the Gulf and re-establishing a more

historic flow of fresh water into the Everglades.

If you drain the land too much, you end up with, not being

able to produce the young fishes that the birds are going to eat.

If you put too much water in the land and hold it there,

the young fishes are eaten by the larger fishes.

So, either extreme is bad for wading birds.

Now we have two extremes going on, one of which is: a largely

over-drained Everglades, like Everglades National Park and

we have very much wetter, deeper areas like the water

conservation areas, which are really good for large fish,

but not necessarily good for small fish.

Now that restoration of the Everglades has begun,

resource managers, armed with one of the longest records of

wading bird population distributions in the world,

can more accurately correlate whether water

management decisions are beneficial by

measuring the effects on the fauna.

As biologists have long understood, the health of

wading bird populations is tied to the health of the

overall ecosystem, especially the distribution, timing and

amount of water flowing through the system.

The water levels in the summer are high.

That means that wading birds which have, are limited by leg

length for foraging, have to find some place else to

forage; they need shallow water to forage in.

So they have to move someplace else.

Water, fish, birds.

It really isn't rocket science! It really isn't.

It's pretty straightforward.

You need, wading birds have to have concentrations of food at

the right times of the year to nest.

If we can restore the Everglades,

in a way that gives them the functional parts

of the ecosystem that they need, I think there's a

really good chance that we're going to see a very large

increase in the wading birds in the Everglades.

In general, I think we've actually seen

a pretty large increase, especially in the last decade.

We've seen an increase in great egrets, white ibises,

wood storks, of three to five times

their breeding population.

That's a really big increase and that's something that I

think is great news and something that most of the

population really doesn't really know about.