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The Roseate Spoonbill 
the northern part of the continents, Spoonbills, with other birds, were 
forced southward into the warmer parts of both the Old World and 
the American continent. In that way the Spoonbill family, which previ- 
ously had dwelt together all around the borders of the Polar Sea, became 
separated into groups, each of which, in its new home, developed specific 
dififerences. 
Of the six species now known America received but one, the Roseate 
Spoonbill, whose peculiar scientific title {Ajaia ajaja) is based on the 
name given it by certain South American Indians. 
Names When naturalists first knew this bird it was found 
throughout tropical America north to our Gulf States 
from Texas to Florida. In the United States it is now confined mainly 
to southern Florida. 
Although I first went to Florida in 1887, it was not until 1908 that 
I saw Spoonbills there. Doubtless always more common on the coast 
than in the interior, the few survivors were then to be found only in the 
most remote part of the great mangrove swamps south of the Everglades. 
On the evening^ of March 29, 1908, after traveling all day through mud 
and mangroves, we reached the Cuthbert rookery, near the extreme 
southern part of the peninsula, and saw, to our intense satisfaction, that 
among the thousands of Herons nesting on it were about forty Spoonbills. 
The beautiful peach-bloom-like pink of the Spoonbills is noticeable 
at a great distance. In manner of flight they resemble Ibises rather than 
Herons, the neck being held fully extended. The flock formation is also 
like that sometimes assumed by the Ibis, each bird flying behind, but a 
little to one side of the bird before it, making a diagonal file. Spoonbills, 
however, so far as I have observed, maintain a steady flapping of the 
wings, not interrupted by short sailings, as in the case of the Ibis. 
The Spoonbill’s peculiarly shaped beak is adapted to an equally 
peculiar method of procuring food. I have never been close to one of 
these birds when feeding in its native haunts, but Audubon tells us that 
they ‘‘wade up to the tibia [shank] and immerse their 
Feeding hills in the water or soft mud, sometimes with the 
head and even whole neck beneath the surface. They 
move their partially opened mandibles laterally to and fro with a con- 
siderable degree of elegance, munching the fry, insects, or small fish 
which they secure before swallowing them.” 
Audubon says nothing of the voice of the Spoonbill. At the Cuth- 
bert rookery I heard no notes I could identify as their’s, but two years 
later, in Mexico, I heard them utter a low, croaking call at their nests. 
T. Gilbert Pearson, who once watched a flock of them feeding at close 
quarters, says that this grunting sound was continuous, as if the birds 
kept up a kind of conversation among themselves. 
Fear in animals is so often born of pursuit by man that it is fre- 
quently difficult to say whether birds that have been much hunted are shy 
instinctively or intelligently. Wild Ducks, we know, are as wary as birds 
