Whether you’ve seen them in the wild or watched them on TV, spoonbills really are a bird that live up to their name. But, have you ever wondered why they have a spoon bill?
Ranger Eloise is here to explain the tactics behind such an strange adaptation to hunting in open waters.
Spoonbills are a fantastic sight to see in the UK, and one that’s likely to get more common over the years as they expand their breeding range further north with the changing climate.
The warmer temperatures have seen spoonbills take refuge both in the winter months and also more recently during the summer too.
Coming from the same order of birds as the pelicans, herons and ibises, spoonbills are perhaps one of the most unusual-looking birds we see along our coastlines.
Other predators with similar diets and habitats here in the UK, such as the grey heron and little egret, have beaks that are long and sharp for jabbing prey at high speeds. Even the closest relatives of spoonbills, the ibises, have long and curved beaks for probing into the ground.
So, why does a spoonbill have such a unique-shaped spatulate bill?
The answer is all down to what’s at the end of the rounded bill.
Along the inside of both the upper and lower mandibles are lots of tiny sensors, that relay information to the brain when something touches them.
Spoonbills are wading specialists, meaning they spend most of their foraging time walking through shallow waters of wetlands, marshes and coastal lagoons to hunt for food.
They have a particularly unusual way of filtering through the water, which involves sweeping their long bills from side to side whilst wading.
This motion, combined with a slightly ajar bill, allows the water to pass through the inside of the bill and importantly to pass over the sensors.
These sensors convert touch and vibrations, from other animals in the water, into electrical signals. The information is then relayed to the brain, causing the spoonbill to snap its beak shut, trapping the prey inside.
It’s a clever trick that means spoonbills can catch a huge range of prey: they’ll eat anything from small aquatic invertebrates like shrimp and crabs, to fish, frogs and lizards.
But catching prey in the spoon-shaped tip of their bills is just one half of a successful capture.
The next difficult part is to pass the food from one end of the beak to the other.
Naturally, with a long bill and short tongue, the only way to pass it is by tossing it up into the air and then catching it at the back of the throat down into the gullet.
All of this means that watching a spoonbill with a successful catch is a fantastic and entertaining spectacle. It’s the type of behaviour that makes them so easy to identify when looking out across wetlands and coastal lagoons.
If you are fortunate enough to see a spoonbill foraging in shallow waters, make sure to watch the incredible tactics to their hunting success, and marvel in that unique spoon-shaped bill.
