I'll add a visual to Jerry Kelly's post about the ibis in flight. Here are links to a couple photos showing the first morning flock rapidly flapping then gliding and then swirling their way into Scarborough Marsh.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lrbevier/8686354284/in/photostream/lightbox/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lrbevier/8686354584/in/photostream/lightbox/
The flocks seem to gather in one spot or the other around the marsh, usually nearer the freshwater inlets (behind the Pelreco building, Dunstan Landing, or, inconveniently, above Rt 1), and work through the pools and channels repeatedly. Margaret Viens and I watched them gorging on something eel-like (4-8" long and wrapping around their bills) in the back portion of the now increasingly saline marsh behind Pelreco. The flock would saturate a small area, a mass of chestnut and shimmering greens, probing with their bills, then, gradually at first and all at once later, flying to the next pool or channel. After 20-30 minutes of working a patch, they'd head back to the first pool and start the process over again.
As an aside, I saw 9 Glossy Ibis in Fairfield yesterday. Any ibis up here is good, and nine of them is really good. This reminded me of how this species has spread in the past. Glossy Ibis are basically an Old World colonist like the Cattle Egret, only the ibis did it by the early 1800s during Audubon's time. Until the late 1960s, Glossy Ibis was a very rare bird in Maine, but the species nested in Connecticut by 1971 and Maine, on Stratton, by 1972 (according to Arthur Borror). White-faced Ibis spread from the West starting about the same time (but especially since the 1980s). Surprisingly, even as late as 2000, people were only speculating about the possibility of hybrids in the wild as the two ibis started to overlap in range (see Patten and Lasley here: http://sora.unm.edu/sites/default/files/journals/nab/v054n03/p00241-p00247.pdf).
Louis Bevier
Fairfield
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