The great shallow impoundment and its low-tide mud flats — ibis, spoonbills, egrets, and wintering pelicans and wood storks by the hundred.
And here it opens up: the waterway widens out into a broad, shallow impoundment, and at low tide the mud flats run out flat and glistening as far as you can see. This is the show. When the conditions are right this is one of the most crowded bird tables in the whole national wildlife refuge system, and you may be looking at hundreds of birds working the mud at once. Watch for white ibis in loose flocks, heads down, that long curved red bill probing the muck like a needle. Watch for the pink of a roseate spoonbill swinging its head side to side. Egrets and herons stalk the shallows, and in the cool months the giants arrive — great white pelicans, and the wood stork, bald-headed and prehistoric.
Get your binoculars up and just pan slowly across it. Don't try to name everything; let it wash over you first — the sheer abundance of it, a marsh doing exactly what a marsh is supposed to do. This is what all those miles of dike were for.
Photo: Andrea Westmoreland from DeLand, United States · CC BY-SA 2.0
