One morning I was perusing ebird when I was alerted to the presence of a large pink bird known as a Roseate Spoonbill in of all places, Southern Berkshire County in Massachusetts. I had no idea as to how to get there but thanks to the miracle of advanced technology, this old lady called up the GPS function on the trusty cell phone.

Once I entered the coordinates, I packed up the gear and was off. The presence of several birders just beyond the bridge tipped me off to the fact that I had arrived in the correct location. Then, we waited. And waited and waited and waited.

After about 3 hours of this I grew tired and headed home. According to the next ebird report, the spoonbill showed up about a half hour after I had left. A couple days later I thought I would try again, this time early in the morning since I do know if nothing else, many birds are “morning people”. I parked my car and a few birders were already out with their spotting scopes and informed me the spoonbill was there. I looked toward the east and there was the back-lit spoonbill feeding with a dozen or so great egrets and a great blue heron. I wanted to get a closer look. I should have known disaster was about to strike the moment one of the birders cautioned me to “be careful” as to not scare the spoonbill off. When that much is at stake, I do tend to crack under the pressure. As I made my approach, I was careful enough to slowly approach on the opposite side of the road as not to scare off the egrets who tend to be rather skittish in my experience with them. Things were going well enough until I tripped over one of my feet, (yes. I do do that on occasion).   I tried to hide, but the egrets saw me. Then all at once everyone was flocked into the air…Including the spoonbill. I managed to squeeze off a couple horribly blurry shots including one where the spoonbill had given me a final gesture of its displeasure- the parting gift.

  It was bad enough that I scared off this extremely rare bird, but the fact that at least 3 other people saw me do it made the situation all the worse.  I really need to keep that paper bag on hand in which to cover my head in such occasions. If ever there were a birding misadventure, the spoonbill experience ranks right up there with the time I scared off a short-eared owl amidst the entire birding paparazzi at Plum Island, (Yes, that was me, too). Perhaps I’ll consider sharing that tale at a later date…but don’t hold your breath for it.