White Morph Reddish Egret
A friend, Neil Gunnar Berg, recently took some great photos of water birds, and wrote about his experience in his blog
1410 Oakwood. With his permission we share his work here.
published March 2017
White Morph Reddish Egret
all photos by Neil Gunnar Berg
Lorna was down on South Padre Island
spending a few days with her sisters who are
not birdcentric, so she did not even go birding
at all. Whaaa? Family more important than
looking at birds? I was going to go down to
retrieve her back to Alamo on Wednesday, but
a package from Amazon was delayed for a day.
The package contained a Nikon D5500 camera
body. The D5500 has been superseded by a
D5600, which has pretty the same specs with
more bells and whistles, so the D5500 was decently
priced. This set is from my first outing
with my older Nikkor 55-300mm lens mounted
on that new camera body. I am quite satisfied
with the results. Issues are mine, not the equipment's.
Called and found that Lorna and her sisters
were out walking the beach and we were to
meet at Padre Brewing for lunch, so I headed
directly to the Birding Center. The birding
Center is actually a fancy building to the side
of the sewage treatment plant which releases
treated fresh water into the Laguna Madre. The
resulting little freshwater to brackish streams
are filled with tiny fish and the birds love it.
Cattails had overgrown the place over time
and were choking the streams so this month
they came in with heavy equipment to remove
some of them and dig out the small ponds. The
fish and birds don't seem to mind a bit, but the
Rails that hide in the cattails are now more distant
and harder to see, let alone photograph.
These photos are not in any particular order,
but I tried to group photos of the same species
together.
At first the white egret/herons are a little
confusing; there are Great Egrets and Snowy
Egrets, then we have little Blue Herons which
are white the first year, in Florida there are
white morph Great Blue Herons. Oh yeah,
there are Cattle Egrets, which came over from
Africa - even flocks out on the lawns here in
Alamo. The first two photos are first because
it is a white morph of the Reddish Egret. It is a
male coming into breeding plumage, probably
its first year because the lores and upper bill
are still rather dark - whatever, it is a rare and
beautiful bird.