Held on Sunday, Dec. 29, the annual Vineyard Christmas Bird Count (CBC) was a successful one. A few hours of drizzle in the morning didn’t help, but didn’t really hinder any of the 13 teams, and temperatures that hit the low 50s made this the most comfortable count in many years.
The overall species count was 127, the last I heard, and in my own territory, which extends from West Chop to Thimble Farm, I turned up 67 species, a few more than average. My final species of the day was an interesting one: a great egret at Mink Meadows, a species that I now expect to find, but which would have prompted my happy dance just 10 or 15 years ago. Here’s the story.
This large, white heron, variously called the common or American egret in the past, and variously either lumped with or split from its Old World counterpart, features a snazzy trait that proved to be a huge liability: sweeping, ethereal plumes that form part of its breeding plumage. In the latter half of the 19th century, those plumes became fashionable additions to ladies’ hats, and decades of out-of-control market hunting followed as hatters tried to get their piece of the action.
In his 1926 monograph on North American herons, ornithologist Arthur Cleveland Bent cited an early 20th century source to note that in 1903, the price being paid to hunters for egret plumes, $32 per ounce, was literally twice the prevailing price of gold. And it required the plumes of four birds to make up that ounce.
Bent described the pre-plume-hunting breeding range of the species, then known as “American egret,” as extending northward to southern New Jersey. After several decades of overhunting, though, the breeding range was “restricted almost entirely to the states of the Gulf Coast.” The U.S. range in winter was basically limited to Florida, with just a few birds wintering north along the coast to South Carolina. The great egret was nearly shot into oblivion.
Happily and famously, laws were finally enacted to protect the great egret and many other birds from such uncontrolled slaughter. Egret numbers began to rebound almost immediately. Bent also points out one relevant behavioral trait of the great egret: a penchant for wandering. Even in Bent’s day, with the population of this bird still greatly depleted, vagrant great egrets made it to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, with “numerous occurrences [in] Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and the other New England states.” This trait, a common one among herons, was surely instrumental in helping the great egret relocate breeding habitat as its numbers rebounded.
By the time I was a young birder in Eastern Massachusetts in the late 1960s and 1970s, great egrets were turning up in the Bay State with some regularity. Massachusetts Audubon’s Breeding Bird Atlas project showed how things progressed from there: Great egrets nesting in Massachusetts expanded from just a few scattered coastal locations during the first atlas, in the 1970s, to a solid distribution centered on the coast of Plymouth County, but extending from Nantucket to the state’s northeastern corner, by 2010.
In recent years, I’ve found the species pretty consistently on the up-Island Breeding Bird Survey route I run on behalf of the U.S. Geodetic Survey. I’ve been told, though I can’t confirm it, that a small colony of great egrets breeds on Nomans Land, which is certainly consistent with what I’ve observed. The expanding range probably derives from two main factors: an ongoing population rebound from the depletion caused by market hunting, and a genuine northward expansion as climate change extends the breeding season at northern latitudes.
In addition to expanding their breeding distribution in our region, great egrets have grown steadily more numerous, as migrants or as individuals, lingering into late autumn or arriving in early spring. Vineyard CBC results illustrate this trend. Our first CBC great egret turned up in 1992, followed by a long wait until the next one in 2007. Since then, the species has gradually but steadily grown more regular, and I’d currently call it “expected in small numbers.” The recent 2024 CBC turned up a total of four individuals.
These days, the great egret is present almost year-round on the Vineyard, disappearing entirely only for the depths of winter (and perhaps not always even then). February is the only month for which a quick search didn’t turn up a Vineyard record. Numbers peak in late summer, when the Vineyard is visited by birds dispersing from breeding colonies in the region. The species is easy to find on the marshes along Sengekontacket Pond and around Menemsha (egrets are fond of feeding along the Menemsha channel).
But these days, I wouldn’t be surprised to find a great egret anyplace on the Vineyard that has water. While the species tends to be wary of humans, individual birds can certainly grow comfortable around intense human activity: I’ve photographed great egrets on several occasions on the shoreline adjacent to Tisbury Shell, just outside Five Corners. Once an egret has located what it deems suitable habitat, it often remains in the area for weeks. Each time I see one, I reflect on the history of this species, showing that while humans can commit huge ecological crimes, we can also act to redress them.
