EGRET NEWS

It’s been announced within the last couple of days that the great white egrets at Shapwick Heath in Somerset are nesting and appeared to have bred.

This means that all three species of egret that until 15 years ago were only scarce visitors to the UK, now breed here. Interestingly, the aetiology of the success of all three species is entirely different.

* The little egret was once a British breeding bird, but hunting, and particularly the demand for the long white feathers that adorn the male in the breeding season (aigrettes) which were particularly prized for centuries by the more exclusive milliners, led to it disappearing as a British breeding bird centuries ago. They started re-colonising during the 1990s and bred in the UK for the first time in 100s of years in 1996.

* The cattle egret is a completely different kettle of fish (or kettle of egrets if you prefer). Until the 1950s it was mostly an east African species found in small numbers in southern Europe. Then for reasons that are still obscure it had a massive expansion of its range and is now found over much of the tropical and temperate world, reaching as far away as Australia and Fiji. I have seen them in Canada, the United States, Hong Kong, Puerto Rico and Mexico, and my late mother – who was very much a lady of her time – refused to believe me. As far as she was concerned, they were purely an African species. They bred for the first time in the UK in 2008.

* The great white egret is an even more recent visitor to these shores, and the range expansion of this species seems to have followed a far more conventional pattern than that of the former cattle egret. Now this too is breeding here.

This is all very interesting not just because of the three different methods by which the egret came to Britain but because our very own Max Blake predicted that the great white egret would be a breeding bird very soon after photographing one (quite possibly the same breeding female) at Shapwick Common in 2009. Good eh?

Image Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Great_Egret_Fish.jpg