BOOK REVIEW: WINSTON WILLIAMS, FLORIDA’S FABULOUS WATERBIRDS

We’ve come to Delray in south Florida for Fathers’ Day with Joe’s dad Ollie and his wife Annette. Whenever we visit here, we go walking at Green Cay or Wakodahatchee Wetlands, water reclamation parks with miles of boardwalk over wetland and hammock – birds everywhere, and the occasional alligator.

  GREEN CAY

I’ve known Annette and Ollie close to twenty-five years. Annette and I, both opinionated feminists, connected very quickly. In early days with Ollie there was the slight wariness of father meeting girlfriend, warm but not knowing whether it’s a passing fancy or a new member of the family. For the first few visits conversation was hesitant. Gradually, a relationship built over dinner and dominoes, our shared love for Joe, and these walks at the wetlands.

ANNETTE AND OLLIE

On one of our first walks Ollie and I fell behind, leaning on the railing, watching the birds. I saw an interesting one that I couldn’t identify. “Do you know what that is?” I asked. “It’s a bird,” he said. As soon as we returned to Gainesville I bought an Audobon Field Guide, inscribed it in front ‘To Ollie from Liz. It’s a bird’ and mailed it off.

NOT A BIRD.

Image: Asbruckman at commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3877883

Now, twenty-odd years later, Joe has found a much better gift for the indifferent bird-watcher, Florida’s Fabulous Waterbirds: Their Stories by Winston Williams.

He got it on the last day of the Friends of the Library Book Sale, when all the books are 10 cents. He usually comes home with a carton-full: a couple of novels, several art books, and lots of nature books, which overflow a bookcase in our bedroom  Last time the box included this treasure, promptly claimed for his Dad.

A FEW OF JOE’S BOOKS

It’s a combination of mostly-exceptional photographs and idiosyncratic prose. The pictures and prose are equally interesting. The baby egret in the nest – yellow face, white punk feather headdress, eyes round and beak wide open with what looks like alarm – is worth the price of the book (even if you bought it new).

This is not a keyed bird-watchers’ guide, but a book driven by the author’s delight. The writing is filled with light-hearted humor that only occasionally falls flat, and fascinating tidbits of information. He devotes nine pages to the brown pelican, clearly his favorite water bird. But he also shows and tells about anhingas, cormorants, storks and flamingos, and has long sections on herons, egrets, and gulls.

Mother Nature has made herons and egrets unfairly confusing, with sex differences and seasonal or age changes. Williams describes the identifying markers, which usually involve beaks and legs, yellow or black. I wish I thought I would remember them.

Cattle egrets were not seen in the new world until the 1930’s – they flew across the Atlanic from Africa. They showed up in Florida in the 1950’s. What I always considered the weird, backward-bent knees of flamingos are actually their ankles.

image: american-bird.com

“The anhinga spears his prey with his pointed beak like an arrow shot from a bow. Sometimes the spear thrust is so powerful that the anhinga has to swim to shore and pry the fish off his beak by rubbing it against a rock…The size of the fish…ranges from small to unbelievable.”

The little green heron sometimes looks as if it has no neck at all, and sometimes stretches it out to “astonishing lengths. This stretching motion is probably used to help move a large fish through its digestive tract. It is the bird equivalent of taking Rolaids. It is known to animal behavior scientists as a ‘comfort movement.’ ”

Herring gulls and black-backed gulls both have a red spot on the bottom halves of their beaks. “This is believed to be a target that aids youngsters in the nest to peck at their parents when demanding food.”

Joe likes to repeat a line from Elmore Leonard. When a Florida farmer hears of a bird-watching tour he asks, “Watch ’em do what? [Would they] pay to watch me plow a field?” Myself, I love spying on birds and beasts. Ollie may be more akin to the farmer than to me, but I bet he’ll like the wit and pictures in this book, and he’ll certainly enjoy Father’s Day with his oldest son.

JOE AND HIS DAD, WITH DAUGHTER LEAH AND THE MAGNIFICENT ULA MAE