Where to see little egret in the UK

How to find little egret

The problem with little egret is no longer finding one. It is being sure that the white bird you can see is this egret and not one of the other two now turning up in Britain. On timing, the records are clear enough and the effect is small: across 30,836 occurrence records in the 11 counties this directory holds sites in, August is the most recorded month at 11.1% and December the least at 5.8%. That is a spread of 5.4 percentage points, and only four of the 54 species with curves here sit inside a narrower band. So August to October is a nudge rather than a plan — 31.0% of the year's records, against the 25% any three months would take by chance. What makes the nudge worth acting on is that almost every county agrees with it.

Eight of the eleven counties peak between July and October, five of them in August, and ten of the eleven are at their quietest between November and February. Carmarthenshire is the one exception on both counts: its 4,415 records peak in March and fall lowest in May. That agreement matters more than the size of the effect. A flat national line can mean two opposite county patterns cancelling each other out — lapwing's does, which is why that page sends you to your own county before it tells you anything else. This one is shallow because ten counties out of eleven lean gently the same way, and the instruction that follows is a different one: the season is real and mild, and it travels.

Two things drive the late-summer rise and only one of them is about birds. Colonies break up in July, the young of the year scatter, and for several weeks afterwards the population is at its largest and least attached to any particular water; birds cross the Channel in those same weeks. That is general ornithology, not something 30,836 records can demonstrate. The other driver is that occurrence figures count records rather than birds, and a warm estuary in late August has considerably more people standing on it with binoculars than the same estuary in December.

The December low is probably not only an artefact of who is out looking. Little egret reached Britain as a colonist from the south and remains a bird of the mild coasts, and frost is what limits it — an egret that cannot get at fish in a frozen ditch moves to saltwater or does not last the week. That is ornithology again rather than anything in these records. What the records do show is where the pattern bites hardest: 42.6% of Cornwall's 3,717 records land in the three months from August, and December is its worst month at 4.6%. The Isle of Wight runs the same way, peaking in August at 15.1% of 2,300 records.

So if one visit has to do it, take a southern or western estuary in the back half of August or in September, and go on a rising tide. Hayle in Cornwall and Newtown on the Isle of Wight are the two whose records concentrate hardest into those weeks. Inland is not a consolation prize — College Lake in Buckinghamshire and Upton Warren in Worcestershire both peak in August as well — but a county with 1,073 records is a thinner bet than one with 3,717.

One caution about that national figure, and it concerns how the figure is made rather than the birds. Each county's curve is a box drawn around the sites this directory holds there plus about ten kilometres, so two sites in different counties can end up measuring the same water. Burton Mere Wetlands and Connah's Quay sit roughly seven kilometres apart on either side of the Dee, their boxes overlap across nine tenths of their longitude span, and Cheshire's 6,721 records and Flintshire's 6,597 differ by under 6% in every month of the year. Together they are 43.2% of the national total. Drop both and the picture holds — August rises to 11.8%, the three months from August to 33.4%, December still last — which is the only reason the national figure is quoted here at all.

For the identification itself, ignore size unless there is something beside the bird to compare it with. The bill is the first thing: black and thin as a spike on little egret, yellow and heavy-looking on great white egret for most of the year. Then the feet, which are yellow, are often the only colour anywhere on the bird, and which trail out behind the tail in flight. Cattle egret is the third of them and the one people miss, shorter and dumpier with a stubby yellow bill, usually within a few metres of a cow.

The white is only white in photographs. A bird that has spent a morning working silt has grey legs to the knee and a dirty front, and the fine plumes that look elegant in a May colony stick up in any wind like something that slept badly. A heronry is not the pretty part of the story either: the trees under the nests go whitewashed and bare, and in warm weather the smell of stale fish carries a good distance.

Two things no reserve page will tell you. On an estuary the tide decides the distance and the calendar has nothing to do with it — at low water on the Hayle or the Dee the egrets are white specks against a great deal of mud, and on a rising tide they come in with the water. Tide tables are free and train tickets are not, so check the first before committing to the second. Inland, egrets fish a reserve by day and then fly out to roost communally in trees that need not be anywhere near a hide, so the last hour of light beats the middle of the day even in the month with the best odds.

One limit worth stating plainly. The counties listed below are the ones where this site holds little egret records, and none of them lies further north than the Dee and the north Wales coast. That is a fact about our coverage and not about the bird, which is still spreading; if you are looking somewhere north of there, an absent page is not evidence of an absent egret.