Blast From The Past Finds - Cattle Egret

Cattle Egret has become something of a "semi" muck bird over the past 20 years. 

I say semi, because, whilst numerically they are clearly a species which has been relegated from, once mega, down to rare and then to mere scarce, spatially speaking they still show a significant bias to the south of Ireland, particularly Wexford and Cork, with a central core population based in Timoleague, west Cork, quite unlike Great White Egret which can and does turn up literally anywhere in Ireland at random.

My first self found Cattle Egret, came way back in 2005, at a time when they were so rare that it was also an Irish tick for me.

April 30th, 2005

At the start of April 2005, I moved to Cork full time. I was still learning to drive, and it would be a few weeks before I had my own car down from Dublin, but on day one in Cork I had already found a Hoopoe, on Toe Head, and a week or two later, a  male Ring-Necked Duck at the Lough, in Cork city. 

I was settling in nicely by all accounts.

A trip with some other birders down to west Cork, simply to do general birding turned rare relatively quickly.

Approaching Clonakilty from the Ring road, we stopped to scan flocks of waders and other birds dotted around the mud.

At this time, and being from Dublin, Little Egrets were still somewhat interesting and, of course, held potential for rarities amongst them.

Scanning around the estuary with my bins, I picked up a small, squat looking egret, which looked somewhat buffy to me, sitting up on the wall beside the estuary, way up at the red benches, in Clonakilty itself, a couple of hundred meters away. I had seen many, many Cattle Egrets before in Spain at this point, and the alarm bells were going off for me. I flagged this to the others immediately.

As the Ring road is both busy and narrow, we opted for driving closer rather than getting scopes out of the boot.

A few seconds later, directly opposite the bird at the narrow neck of the estuary, we were looking at Ireland's 9th Cattle Egret. An absolute mega in those days and the first in 7 years!

Cattle Egret - Clonakilty - as with seemingly a lot of rarities from back then, the online archives which may have held them seem to have all disappeared. There must be dozens, if not hundreds of images of this bird out there, lost to time as it was massively twitched over several days of being available.

It was a really enjoyable bird to watch and made a lot of people quite happy with the catch up tick or even just the year tick 

The following day I headed straight back down with Dara Fitzpatrick, who also needed it. This was a good decision, as a Black-Winged Stilt turned up at White's Marsh!

The rest of Clan Foley also came down from Dublin, intercepted these birds and then we all made our way rapidly the following day again to Ballycotton, where a Golden Oriole and Broad-Billed Sandpiper also made their way into our lists! 

Not often you can you found a mega and got 4 top Irish ticks in one weekend in Spring! 😎

It wasn't long after this bird, that Cattle Egret became a thrash species when Ireland saw a major influx of over 80 birds over the course of that winter.

That said, they are still a bit slow to get going with their colonization.

Way back in 2008 I had a pair in a Little Egret colony in Summer, and though I couldn't confirm breeding, I strongly suspected it. However I would have thought that by now, they would be active in a few colonies around the south coast, which doesn't seem to have come to pass.

I now suspect that Great White Egret may very well become established as a breeder before Cattle Egret does. Only time will tell.

Since this bird, which was the 9th for Ireland at that point, I have of course found quite a few more, including here and here.

They will always be a fun bird to find in Ireland I reckon, even if they do a full Little Egret.