Tactile-feeding wading birds, such as wood storks and white ibises, require high densities of prey such as small fishes and crayfish to support themselves and their offspring during the breeding season. Prey availability is often determined by seasonal hydrologic pulsing of wetlands, such as the subtropical Everglades, where spatial distributions of prey can vary 7 through time, becoming heterogeneously clumped in patches, such as ponds or sloughs, as the wetland dries out. In this mathematical modeling study, we examine two possible foraging strategies and examine how they impact total energetic intake over a time scale of one day. In the first, wading birds sample prey patches without a priori knowledge of the patches’ energetic values, moving from patch to patch, staying long enough to estimate the prey density, until they find one that meets a predetermined satisfactory threshold and staying there for longer period. For this case, we solve for a wading bird’s expected mean prey intake over the course of a day, given varying theoretical probability distributions of patch prey density across the landscape. In the second strategy considered, it is assumed that the wading bird samples a given number of patches, and then uses memory to return to the highest quality patch. The difference between these two strategies is that of immediate versus deferred reward. Our results show how total intake over a day is impacted by assumptions of the parameters governing the spatial distribution of prey among patches, which is a key source of parameter uncertainty in real managed ecosystems. Perhaps surprisingly, foraging using memory does not attain any considerable advantage of higher prey intake than simple foraging with prey density threshold. These results will contribute to understanding the foraging of wading birds and to the management of wetlands. (Based on joint work with Hyo Won Lee , Simeon Yurek, and Stephen Tennenbaum).