George is a busy Roseate Spoonbill. About four years old, he spends his days foraging for fish and moving throughout South Florida. For much of 2021, as evenings approached he retreated to roosting trees within Everglades National Park, waiting out the night in the safety of the raised branches.

How do we know?

George wears a tracker, part of an ongoing study at the Audubon Everglades Science Center.

Spoonbill were “very common in parts of the Southeast until the 1860s, [when] spoonbills were virtually eliminated from the United States as a side-effect of the destruction of wader colonies by plume hunters,” Ken Kauffman explains in Lives of North American Birds. “[They] began to re-colonize Texas and Florida early in 20th century… [but] are still vulnerable to degradation of feeding and nesting habitats,” he continues.

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