Sunday, September 03, 2006

Mystery Egret

We saw this Egret at Boca Slagbaai. Posted by Picasa


We looked in our bird book and discovered that it is not a Cattle Egret and not a Snowy Egret, but we couldn't find out what it actually is.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Brad,
I think this might be the Reddish Egret in the white morph. It is in between the sizes of Snowy and Cattle. It has a shaggy plummage and is crested as seen in the photo. It has the bicolored bill, the basal half pale flesh colored and the top dark. The white morph is seen on all three islands but is much rarer than the colored ones. Info from Birds of the Neth. Antilles pg. 52. Terri T

Anonymous said...

I think Terri T has way too much time on her hands! :) Chris B

Brad said...

Ha-ha Chris, what does that say about Sandra and Me spending our Saturday mornings tromping all over the place taking pictures of these beasts?

By the way, Berni L. thinks it might be a Snowy Egret that is hiding its yellow feet. I lean towards Terri's idea. Unfortunnately, the bird was no longer hanging out at Slagbaai last week when we went by and looked for it, so we'll probably never know.

Also by the way, Terri, two geologists presented a very interesting talk last night at Habitat, about how and where Bonaire, Aruba and Curacao may have formed.