The meadows and the Great White Egret

There is nothing quite as exciting as a surprise. When you spend a lot of time watching the wildlife of one place in particular, surprises necessarily get fewer and further between - or so one might think. Every time I stand and watch the comings and goings in the ever changing mosaic of meadows, scrub, floods and reedbeds I cannot help but hope that I will see something there that I have not seen before. Most times, I am not disappointed. It might not be a new species, sometimes its a piece of behaviour, or an unexpected interaction, an aberration, or just the way the light is playing on the water, but on this day, it was a new species for the meadows.
While photographing nicely reflected albeit a little distant Lapwings, I suddenly saw an Egret coming low over the reedbeds and as I don't have great shots of Little Egrets here I flicked the settings quickly and shot a few frames. The problem with just looking down a viewfinder is that size is very difficult to judge and you are just concentrating or panning with the bird and trying to get different points of the wing beat. Then the ageing grey matter starts to kick in, other things register, the feet are black, the wingbeat's elongated, the bill's yellow.... oh goodness!

And then it dropped down back out of sight in the reedbed. This is a very large bird, around the size of a Grey Heron, but dazzling white. I looked for it for hours the next day to no avail but the day after that I caught up with it at a distance and then so did a few other people,

and for all we know, its still there. And thats why I keep going back.


(Thanks to Sandy and Nathalie for helping me make my mind up to resurrect the blog!)