There’s an unwritten rule in newspaper journalism that any story about egrets must have one of two headlines. Either ‘no egrets’ if numbers are dropping or ‘egrets, we’ve had a few’ if they are booming. At the moment, fortunately, it’s the latter.
The little egret (egretta garzetta) can be seen as something of a trailblazer. The first only nested successfully in England as recently as 1997, on Brownsea Island in Dorset, and there are now up to 1,000 pairs in the country, according to the RSPB. They compete for food with herons and cormorants on the Thames and even have been known to venture into cities and towns.
What looks like its big brother, the enormous great white egret (ardea alba) was, last year, seen in so many places in Britain that the website Bird Guides — the twitchers’ bible — no longer classifies them as a rare species and only reports sightings in regions where they remain scarce.
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