Mark Whiteside texted me Saturday afternoon to say he had seen a pair of Smooth-billed Anises at Fort Zachary Taylor.
Anises are fairly common in the Caribbean and South America, and used to be relatively common—or at least easy to find—in South Florida. I remember seeing my first small cluster of anises from the window of a classroom at Fairchild Tropical Gardens in Miami when I was taking the Florida Master Naturalist course.
There were four or five of them. One of the anoles had a struggling Cuban anole in its beak; the anole’s tail was lashing back and forth as the anole tried to control the lizard enough to swallow it. It was like one of those stop-motion dinosaur/monster movies from the 1960s, only in miniature. It made a good first impression.
Anises are about the size of a blue jay, all black with iridescent edges to their feathers, and a beak shaped like a guitar pick. Their posture often involves a slight forward bend, making them look like the gothic members of the cuckoo family, which makes sense since they are members of the cuckoo family. As far as I know, the Smooth-billed Ani is the only bird that has “smooth” in its name.
They were virtually unknown in Florida until the 1930s, when they were discovered breeding near Lake Okeechobee. By the mid-1970s they had spread as far as Jacksonville, St. Petersburg, and Miami. Then their numbers slowly began to decline. You could still find populations like the one in Fairchild, but they too began to decline. I remember, when I was still working as a tour guide, driving for two full days through the overgrown lots of Fort Lauderdale with a couple who were dying to see anise. They wouldn’t cooperate.
Anises have never been common in the Keys, but they are always rare and are seen about once a year. I have seen them a few times at Fort Zach, the Indigenous Park, and once on Sugarloaf. They are almost always solitary birds, but I once saw a group of six in the Marquesas. It is possible that they live largely undisturbed in the sanctuary. It is possible that they were strays from Cuba.
A week and a half ago, Adrianna Nelson saw one during the Florida Keys Hawkwatch at Curry Hammock on Grassy Key.
Smooth-billed anises don’t tend to stay long in the Keys. Most aren’t found again after their first sighting, so I wasn’t exactly hopeful when I finally made it to Fort Zach on Monday morning to look for them.
As I walked along the edge of the ditch toward the spot where Whiteside had supposedly seen the birds, I was thinking mostly about the end of times. Not because I had a feeling of doom and gloom, but because of the sea grapes.
A few years ago I started thinking about what skills I would have in the event of an apocalypse. Semi-professional birdwatching probably wouldn’t do me much good. Neither would writing smart birdwatching columns. I have some basic carpentry skills, but that usually requires power tools, and in a post-apocalyptic world, those tools are probably hard to come by.
Eventually I came up with the idea of alcohol. If you can produce alcohol, you will always be able to survive, especially in a barter society. Wine and beer would be good, but if you want to transport alcohol in a car-free landscape, distilled spirits would be a better idea. The portability would also increase your customer base and allow you to remain competitive.
Distilling spirits requires a still, which wouldn’t be too difficult to build. The problem would be heating the mash to release the alcohol, which requires a lot of energy. Traditionally, this is done with fire. In a world with limited options, you don’t want to use up a lot of resources, so I came up with the idea of a solar still to avoid that waste. I could use magnifying glasses to harness the sun’s nearly infinite energy and provide heat to the boiler.
With that problem solved, the next question was: what easy-to-grow, locally available, and climate-resistant fruit could be fermented to make the mash? I’d been thinking about sea grapes for years, since they’re plentiful in Florida and pretty hard to destroy. I’d also heard that some conchs even made wine out of them.
The hitch in my plan came a few weeks ago when I was hanging out with birding guide and bird artist extraordinaire Rafael Galvez. We were standing there chatting when he reached down, plucked a dark fruit from a sea grape bush, and just threw it in his mouth. I’d never thought about eating a sea grape before, so I tried one. And it was pretty good—a little tart, a little sour. But my whole post-apocalyptic plan instantly collapsed. A good 98% of the thing was seeds. You’d probably need 200 of them and a lot of labor to fill even one shot glass. Distilling would reduce said shot glass to a fraction of its volume. How was I supposed to create wealth and power in a post-apocalyptic world with something so labor-intensive?
Anyway, as I searched for these anises, my path was lined with one sea grape after another, as if to taunt me. I was jolted out of this microfugue by a distant sound, indistinct but strange enough to raise my hopes. It grew louder as I entered the hammock at the far end of the open field.
It’s dense in there, with acacias and pines and tons of other trees, but eventually I caught a glimpse of one of the Anis hopping through the trees, then a glimpse of the second. Anis’ calls always sound somehow artificial to me, like a digital creation, a bugle on a very small submarine. But I also heard another call that I’d never heard before, like a baby sucking on a pacifier, but also somehow electronic.
I spent a long time trying to follow them through the thicket. Strangely, the Smooth-billed Anis I have seen in the Caribbean and South America are always sociable and not at all afraid of people. But all the ones I have seen in Florida in recent years have mostly been shy and furtive. This makes me think that their temperament in this respect is learned rather than innate.
I had almost given up trying to catch a glimpse when they flew out of the hammock into the small wedge of native plants, mostly surrounded by spartina grass. They disappeared into the grass and then reappeared with dragonflies in their mouths, first one dragonfly, then a second, then a third.
It was very cool to learn that there were more birds than we thought. I was happy with this thought until I was halfway back to the car. Then I started to wonder if it would be possible to ferment coconuts.
