How to Tell a Great Egret from a Snowy Egret (and others)

If you have trouble distinguishing between heron species, you are not alone! It helps though, if two of the species happen to be foraging next to each other. That happened today at Willow Lake on the campus of CSU Stanislaus. The Snowy Egret (Egretta thula) and Great Egret (Ardea alba) are similar in shape and coloration, but the details are definitely different. The Great Egret is larger, has a yellow bill, and black legs and feet. The Snowy Egret is smaller, has a black bill, has green legs and yellow feet. Cattle Egrets (the picture below is from Honolulu in Hawaii) are also white, but combine a yellow bill with yellow legs, and in breeding season, they have some buff-colored feathers on their head and back. The Great and Snowy Egrets are native to North America. The Cattle Egret (Bubulcus ibis) arrived in the Americas in the late 1800s and spread to North America in the late 1940s. They are common now all the way north into Canada.

Also, as can be seen below, Great Egrets get the joke quicker than a Snowy Egret!

Cattle Egret in Downtown Honolulu

I'm back from another long trip, this time across the Pacific Northwest, and Wi-Fi was hard to come by in the wilds we were exploring. But now I can continue our exploration of the birds of Hawai'i, and then move on to the Pacific Northwest species I was able to photograph during the last two weeks. Today's species is the Cattle Egret (Bubulcus ibis) that I was able to shoot while strolling through a coastal park in downtown Honolulu.

The Cattle Egrets have an uncomfortable history with Hawai'i. They originated in Africa, spread to north and south America, and were introduced for pest control purposes in Hawai'i in 1959. They did their job, inhabiting pastures and fields, picking off flies and other biting pests. But as agriculture has decreased, and interest in preserving the native species increases, the Cattle Egrets have become a problem, as they compete for food resources, and pick off the eggs and chicks of native species on the islands, especially the Stilts and Coots.