Wings of Cedar Key
By Doug Long
As our truck wound along the sandy pathway, side mirrors brushed against palmettos that formed into a subtropical jungle. A few old cottages painted turquoise and yellow rose from the menagerie of live oaks—wooden buildings sitting on high stilts. Our hunt was for a rental a few days along the back bay waters of Cedar Key on Florida’s Gulf Coast.
Leaving our neatly ordered suburban lives of tree-lined streets behind, we began passing rustic fishing shacks, drying nets used for clamming, a Dollar General store and small marina—which was little more than one gas pump, a few bait wells and flat-bottomed skiffs used at high tide. Nautical charts tacked on a wall showed single-digit depths from Snake Key to the Suwannee River. There was a faded takeout menu for Tony’s “world famous” clam chowder.
Locals—many with tough browned skin from years washed in the Florida sun—often work the waters here to scratch out a living. Their well-worn boats scatter among dozens of small mangrove covered islands, morning to night, raising crab traps and checking farmed plots for clams and oysters.
It wasn’t so much for a ride around the old Florida town in one of its aging rented golf carts—one way to cover the island’s back roads—but mainly to see birds. While there are about 400 native Cedar Key year-round residents, the winged population here numbers in tens of thousands.
Serious birders—something I never pretended to be—are seen with expensive cameras on tripods with long telescoping lenses and spiral notepads. But for anyone, seeing so many winged creatures across estuaries and mangroves and pristine saltwater flats— you feel a sense that just maybe, the world’s not ready to give in to climate change just yet.
An eco-tour captain who runs a covered pontoon through local waters charging tourists by the hour mentions Black Bellied and Piping Plovers, Western Sandpipers, Marbled Godwits, Whimbrels and Red Knots. Birds living on the mud flats on high and low tides, many arrive in Florida’s fall season and winter—when nights cool for fires in clay chimineas or river rock enclaves and people gaze across the marshes.
Silhouettes of birds can fill the air. A good number of these flocks come a long way—as far as the cold tundra of the arctic circle to visit here.
We found our cottage, but were quickly welcomed by clouds of no-see-ums and biting black flies—perhaps nature’s way of creating coastal land made for birds, not people.
After carting our luggage and a cooler up a rickety staircase—a house painted bright with Caribbean-like pastels, windows shuttered with bamboo blinds—we discovered our own back door to a screened deck. It was situated fifteen feet up and offered a wide-angled vista of pristine waters, small islands and quiet ponds. A neighbor's dock, about a hundred yards downwind, stretched across the tall grasses and palmettos and incoming tidal wash a good quarter mile out—reaching to a waving turtle flag on a rusted pole; a place where a dented aluminum canoe sat waiting in solemnity.
The deck gave the feel of an outdoor theater built with two-by-eights and formed with wicker chairs. A strong breeze pushed across creating rippled waters gathering like tiny waves. A few tattered holes in the screen had thankfully been repaired keeping the “biting creatures” at bay.
In the morning, I rose early.
I ground fresh beans from Brazil—the brown paper bag stating my morning coffee was helping to restore Amazon Rainforests—and found a wet cushioned chair with a front row seat to the back bay.
The sun was just rising over rustling palms. A filter of red and orange illuminated the marsh and islands beyond. There were sounds of birds—most hidden in trees and island shrubs. The scent of the coffee mixed with sulfuric smells of low-tide. What had been water the day before was now mud. Thick marsh grass hid the chorus of croaks and chirps. But the longer I sat watching, the more birds became visible.
A tern, with Batman-like wings, sat on the branch of a dying cedar tree. He stiffened with nervous attention. Eyes were on the marsh. Others who entered his space—were met with aggression. He flew to the sky repeatedly in wild chases always returning to his branch.
I watched as an Osprey flew from his nest in a tall pine—wings gliding gracefully on high currents of west wind. On water, a local crabber in his flats boat came racing past a small island a short distance away—the high pitched buzz of his 8-horsepower engine piercing the silent morning.
In Florida summers, heat rises with a cloud of steam. The water forms in tiny ripples as thick, humid air builds through hours of sun. Pursuing anything beyond lifting a glass of sweet tea on ice leaves a shirt soaked in perspiration. By late morning, there’s little coming off the coast beyond occasional puffs of wind. A fan whirls slowly. The clouds start to form.
As the hours pass from our back bay porch, we begin to feel gusts of air. Cumulus mountains billowing, rising sharply across the horizon; skies slowly darkening. The multitude of birds, awakened from their midday slumber, frantically seek cover on the lee side of the wind, tucking into mangroves and nests.
I watched curiously, thinking how spoiled we humans are; closing double-paned windows and watching storms from light-filled rooms—never a need to get wet. Our nearby tern clings to his dead branch, now swaying in the breeze—eyes still turned skyward protecting and holding his ground.
Across from the horizon of blackened skies, the rain came.
In her book, Rain - A Natural and Cultural History, Cynthia Barnett says “Florida summer afternoons create just the atmospheric chaos a thunderstorm craves,” describing how “rain’s applause rings loudest from the palm trees, fronds drumming with steady appreciation.”
Wind pushes into our screened porch as the distant clouds fill the air with a haze connecting the sky with water. The Osprey in the tall pine circles his nest lifting high, then returning, hunkering down until his white-tipped head can no longer be seen. Two pelicans glide in like runway planes and stream past us finding cover beneath a wooden dock.
As the heat fades, the rain sprays a deluge-like waterfall off our high-pitched roof. The afternoon had transformed. The air cooled. The birds, gathering droplets of beaded water on their tiny wings, could only wait and listen—knowing it would soon pass as it had a hundred times before; quietly perched on nests of fragile eggs, maternal warmth beneath their feathered coats.
In 2015, Cedar Key became home to a mysterious disappearance—on an island just a mile or two beyond our rented back porch called Seahorse Key. These islands have names on local fishing charts, but most are not made for exploring. An exception, but only open to a select few, Seahorse has a small lighthouse atop an ancient sand dune and is home to a wood-framed building that serves as a marine research center for University of Florida students shuttled out by boat.
It was also home to one of the largest bird rookeries on the Gulf Coast. Within its tight mangrove and oak forest and conch-shelled beach, experts estimated—although not easy to count—there were as many as 20,000 nests that included White Ibis, Brown Pelicans and Tricolored Herons. Every branch weighed down with birds guarding their eggs—an enormous task for some just to lay a few hatchlings and nurture them to flight; often a process taking months to complete.
Kenny McCain, a retired Fish and Wildlife staff member, said in an NPR August 2015 story that he had become a kind of steward to the island—taking his boat on patrol around the mangroves most mornings to monitor the colony. Its feathered residents had been coming here for decades.
Then on a routine visit one early morning in April after a storm, McCain reported—something was different. He motored in toward a cove and cut off his engine and listened. There was an eerie silence. The birds were gone.
Thousands of nests and generations of eggs were somehow left behind. They had vanished overnight.
“For all those birds to just up and leave is pretty shocking,” said Larry Woodward, working at the time for the Lower Suwannee and Cedar Keys National Wildlife Refuge.
By 2019, a number of birds began nesting on neighboring Snake Key. But Seahorse Island remains a mystery to this day.
Adam Nicholson wrote a book called, “The Seabirds Cry,” and spent a lifetime trying to understand bird behavior.
Nicholson was hooked when his father took him across to observe nesting birds off the windswept coast of Scotland as a young boy. Later in life, he started to explore high cliffs and rocky shores from Norway to the Atlantic seaboard. He observed birds that traveled across entire oceans and returned to the same rock on the same cliff year after year. His worries today are for seabird colonies disappearing to extinction—much resulting from climate change.
“Extinction stalks the oceans,” he says.
Evening was approaching as we gathered again on our back bay porch, biting flies bouncing off its screens. The beauty of the open marsh, the lowering sun—so much nature had soon begun to fade in waning light. The pierce of an American Bald Eagle sounded in the distance.
Gathering clouds would soon take our sunset away, but there was a sudden urge to climb into the nearby aluminum boat—to flip it upright and join the sounds of birds calling; a few dips of the paddle moving us forward to another world.
“The world lies east,” said poet Sydney Lanier. “How simple the marsh and the sea and the sky! A league and a league of marsh grass, waist-high, broad in the blade ... stretch leisurely off in a pleasant plain.”
Nature enthusiast Charles Seabrook grew up along the marsh lands of southern Georgia and authored, The World of the Salt Marsh, calling it “a vast nursery that succor untold number of creatures great and small.”
At Cedar Key, the salted wings of birds begin to fly from all compass points, each grasping a mangrove branch, a pine or an oak. It’s a place birds have come to for centuries in time.
High tide is forming a small tributary, slowly pushing into the marsh grasses below. The sweltering summer heat begins to fade and the cooling breezes stretch across the waters. Flashes of lightning flicker ten miles distant.
By nightfall, the cottage is quiet—the last of a stack of pulp fiction read, a few scattered lamps turned off. We could hear the winds rattling hard beyond the porch. Night bugs fill the air and palm trees shake against the wooden cottages east side. A rumble of thunder grows louder, deeper; the rhythm of drums continues to build until rains begin to fall again.
There’s the sound of a southern rain on our old-Florida tin roof—the feeling of being inside... safe; the heavy tapping from above and its metronome-like rhythm.
My thoughts are of our little black Tern, the Osprey and the pelicans clinging to their windblown branches; the lightning that suddenly lit their world in the dark night—the tiny newborns beneath them that had yet to fly.
For them, everyday is survival. It’s their life on the marsh.
Published in Saw Palm Florida Literature & Art; Volume 15 Spring 2021