Some more old photos: 3 different Spoonbill species.
Black-faced Spoonbill, Baekryung Island
Baekryung is a large, remote island off the far northwest coast of South Korea: if you could look a little above and past this spoonbill, you would see the (beautifully uninhabited) North Korean coast. The very charismatic Black-faced Spoonbill is a critically endangered species, endemic to East Asia, and I was overjoyed to find a few of these birds—and evidence of breeding!—at this hitherto unsuspected site. The birds and their rocks were protected by the ubiquitous barbed-wire fences that shield border areas in the peninsula. Unfortunately, I heard from a colleague who visited this spot a year later the Spoonbills were no longer in evidence—probably driven off by islanders who had reached the spot by boat in order to gather seagull eggs.
Roseate Spoonbills. Florida.
These birds were protected by a different kind of barb—the photograph is from St. Augustine’s Allligator Preserve, where the large number of toothy reptiles prevent nest-raiding raccoons from swimming out to the trees of the wader rookery.
Eurasian Spoonbill. Gageo Island,South Korea.
Maybe my favorite Spoonbill—I’ve had a thing for them since I was (for a while) a kid-with-binoculars in England. I like their faces … This individual was a migrant, stopping over for one morning only on an equally remote island, this time off the very southwestern corner of the Korean peninsula.