How a colony of egrets made Miami’s inner city its winter home
Beneath stacks of highway overpasses, hard by a county jail, inside barbed-wire fencing and perched above a concrete-colored pond, it’s a sight for sore eyes: Egrets. A couple of hundred egrets, impossibly white against the dingy landscape, as if they were dipped in fluffy clouds on their flight down from the sky.
They have found a winter home in Miami’s inner city. True snowbirds, they’re staying at a green condo of bushes just north of Northwest 14th Street between Northwest Seventh Avenue and I-95, on vacant Florida Department of Transportation land dotted with royal palms, oaks and ceiba trees. Discarded McDonald’s wrappers, Doritos bags, coffee cups, cigarette butts, shoes, sweatshirts and bedsheets have collected against the surrounding fences. Traffic zooms overhead and the loud noise bounces off large support columns sunk into the water.
A tree grows in Brooklyn. A flock of egrets roosts in Overtown.
“It’s like an oasis for them,” said Alex Gomez, a cook walking to work. “It’s the closest thing to a swamp around here.”
You could also call them jailbirds, as they’ve chosen to settle next to the Miami-Dade Women’s Detention Center. Perhaps they give wishful inmates a glimpse of freedom as they float by the dreary building’s tiny windows.
Birds amid the blight.
“Nature is right here if you look around,” said Dennis Olle, a Miami lawyer, birder and former president of the Tropical Audubon Society.
“Give it a bit of a chance and it’s remarkable what will happen despite the fact that we’ve done our best to destroy their habitat.”
There are so many egrets — plus a few great herons, mockingbirds and doves — that it is unnerving to encounter them in this spot. But they are peaceful and minding their own business, not like the evil black crows massed on the playground jungle gym in the Alfred Hitchcock classic “The Birds.”
“I think it’s very beautiful,” said Jessica McKnight, who was on her way home from Northwestern High School in Liberty City. She’s got friends at Booker T. Washington High, which is right across the street from the birds and their drainage pond. “I hope the sewage and pollution in the water doesn’t kill them. It’s got a bad odor.”
Egrets — these are common cattle egrets — are quite hardy and subsist mostly on insects, worms, frogs and whatever fish they can find.
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it is that living beings will eat anything,” said Roger Hammer, a Miami naturalist who is a survivalist instructor for the TV show “Naked and Afraid.” He tells participants on the reality show to eat maggots, ant and termite larva, rattlesnakes and frogs. And they do, if they want to survive.
“With all the development around South Florida, animals are desperate for food sources,” Hammer said. “Decades and decades ago, this whole area was thick with birds. Ninety percent of the wading birds in the Everglades are gone; where you see 10 herons there used to be 100. John James Audubon described how the sky would darken with passenger pigeons. Now they are extinct.”
Cattle egrets are particularly adaptable.
“They’re opportunistic and colonial — they’ll see a crowd and think, ‘Hey, let’s check out what’s happening,’” Olle said. “I’ve seen them walking between cars stopped in the middle of South Dixie Highway. As long as there’s water, a place to roost and nobody shooting at them, they have a high tolerance for man and other large mammals because that’s how they make their living.”
Birders like Olle have documented up to 65 species of birds in urban Miami. Olle, one of the leaders of the annual Christmas Bird Count, found three rare rose-breasted grosbeaks at Henry Reeves Park on Northwest 10th Street last year and the first one sighted in 50 years at Sewell Park on Northwest South River Drive in Little Havana in 2017.
“Sewell Park has more unusual birds per square foot than anywhere else around,” said Olle, who is also vice president of the local Miami Blue chapter of the North American Butterfly Association. “Woodlawn Cemetery is the best. Golf courses like Melreese, which is going to be turned into a shopping mall with a soccer stadium, have lots of birds.”
Hammer suggests planting your yard or neglected lots with bird-friendly foliage to create stopovers along migratory corridors. Birds are good for the environment and good for the soul.
“If we could choose to be any animal,” Gomez said, as two dozen egrets flapped their wings and flew over an ugly billboard, obscuring its rusted frame as they banked left, “I think most everybody would be a bird.”
This story was originally published February 19, 2019 at 7:00 AM.
