Pacific Reef Egret foraging along a canal

Posted by BESG on 28 February 08, Thursday
Contributed by Dr Leong Tzi Ming & R Subaraj

On the afternoon of 15th February 2008, Dr Leong Tzi Ming was taking a casual stroll along the Telok Kurau Canal near his home when he spotted a heron foraging in the shallow water of the canal.

Tzi Ming is familiar with Little Heron (Butorides striatus), Black-crowned Night Heron (Nycticorax nycticorax) and Little Egret (Egretta garzetta), but not this bird. His suspected it to be a Pacific Reef Egret (Egretta sacra).

According to our bird specialist R Subaraj, “This is indeed a dark-phase Pacific Reef Egret. I have seen him flying over East Coast Road by your canal a couple of times over the past month.”

These birds are usually seen singly or in pairs. And most pairs Subaraj saw consisted of a dark and a white morph.

The Pacific Reef Egret is an uncommon resident. Its typical habitats are rocky shores, exposed reef flats and sometimes along sandy shore and low-tide mud around mangroves. But in urbanised Singapore, our concretised canals are becoming feeding grounds for this as well as other herons like Grey, Night and Striated.

Image by Dr Leong Tzi Ming.

Related Posts:

Sighting of the Pacific Reef Egret . The Pacific Reef Egret (Egretta sacra), also known as... Pacific Reef Egret: A fish too large to handle “On a recent visit to Singapore’s Cyrene Reef, I counted... Chinese Egret, problems of identification The posting of a Chinese Egret (Egretta eulophotes) sighted at... Little Egret foraging in shallow water Lena Chow videoed a Little Egret (Egretta garzetta) foraging... Foraging behaviour of the Little Egret SK Foo was at the the Sungei Buloh Wetland... Chinese Egret at Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve A Chinese Egret (Egretta eulophotes) was photographed by Mendis... Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Email Post

Categories: Feeding strategy, Heron-Egret-Bittern

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Anti-spam word: (Required)*
To prove you're a person (not a spam script), type the security word shown in the picture. Click on the picture to hear an audio file of the word.