Charlotte and I scoped Moonlight (Mud) Bay at Baileys Harbor
this morning, Nov. 27, and counted 26 tundra swans. One, a young
of the year, was quite gray and sported a rosy-pink bill. Seldom
have we missed seeing these stately large white birds there at
this time of the year. Hopefully there still may be some in the
area for the Christmas bird counts in mid to late December.
Dean and Bernice Shumway, who live east of Sister Bay,
reported a cattle egret on their lawn for the past few days.
It’s been over 20 years since we’ve observed any of these
interesting little herons in the county.
One of the most phenomenal occurrences in the history of North
American birds created a great deal of excitement about 46 years
ago. A small number of 20-inch-long cattle egrets were sighted
in various places along the East Coast ranging from Florida to
Newfoundland and even inland to the Chicago region. This marked
the first time a new species arrived on this continent by its own
accord and became well established.
Several friends and I thoroughly enjoyed our first sighting of
them in the Horicon Marsh region in the early 1960’s. True to
form, they were exhibiting their most renowned trait, searching
for food in the company of cows. The large grazing animals were
inadvertently flushing insects from the pasture while the tiny
egrets scurried back and forth, often quite precariously beneath
the cows’ hooves, catching their prey, including grasshoppers,
crickets, etc. Occasionally one of the birds would even perch
upon the back of one of the placid cows.
It was our friend, Tom Erdman of UWGB, who discovered the
first nesting cattle egrets in Wisconsin in 1971. It was in
Brown County, in the lower Green Bay area, in a large colony of
black-crowned night herons where the two nests were observed.
Five young were produced that year. Since then sizable colonies
of these birds have been established in Oconto County, at the
Horicon marsh and elsewhere.
It is still a mystery as to exactly how the first cattle
egrets reached the Americas. Generally it is assumed that a
flock became lost while flying along the northwest coast of
Africa and was eventually aided by strong winds in reaching
British Guiana. The coastal mangrove islands there suited these
birds perfectly. Eventually they reached Central America and
finally Florida, perhaps via the Gulf of Mexico. Many believe
they arrived in the Sunshine State as early as 1948.
When a call came to me in early November of 1978 from Gordon
Lodge, in northern Door County, telling of nine small pure white
birds perched on their dock, immediately I thought, CATTLE
EGRETS! Moments later my wish was fulfilled as we watched and
photographed the hilarious antics of the "marvelous
nine." Given little black derbies and moustaches we could
just as well have been watching nine miniature two-winged
Charlie Chaplins as they comically, in slapstick fashion,
strutted around the dock appearing to be playing games in the
gusty wind.
Roosts of as many as 30,000 cattle egrets in Florida today
reflect the success of these stocky birds. Apparently there is
slight competition between this dapper little egret and other
native species. This is because the cattle egrets spend much of
their time in open fields and uplands searching for insects
rather than in marshes and wetland areas where the other species
of herons and egrets feed.
Many birders of the Old World refer to this petite egret as
the buff-backed heron. Pinkish buff feathers adorn the crown,
back and lower neck of this bird during the breeding season.
Then too its legs are a greenish yellow to dull reddish and its
bill can vary from yellow to orange to reddish. Fall and winter
find the plumage white, bill yellow and legs dark brown or
blackish.
November is a likely time to see these rare transient visitors
pausing for a rest on their way south for the winter. The
magnitude of surprise shown by the initial sighting of the first
cattle egret in the US was perhaps equaled by our thrill as we
enjoyed the clownish parade of the "natty nine!"
