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All: Eric Mills and I, without having seen Hans Toom's message, went to the W. side of Cow Bay Lake yesterday mid-day and found the Little Egret loafing amidst a bunch Ring-billed Gulls on a bar just off the shore. I took some distant digiscope shots at maybe 200 m., and have posted one, with insert, on the NS-RBA photo site. Other birds of some interest included numerous Short-billed Dowitchers (including one group of 250 at Grand Desert, HRM, and another group of hunndreds, hotly pusued by a very pale-backed adul Peregrine. We saw a few apparent _hendersoni_ among the dowitchers, but their underparts are beginning to fade. A group of 10 Hudsonian Godwits, two Black-headed and two Bonaparte's Gulls had returned to the estuary on the Conrad's Beach road, The Little Egret is an adult, but its small head plumes (filoplumes) are much worn, and there is maybe only one shortened thin one left. The bird has a little bit of olive yellow immediately in frot of its left eye. This is presumably not a result of a trace of Snow Egret genes (the two species may have hybridized in the W.I. and FL), but a remnant of the yellowish or reddish that develops in high breeding condition. (Some may remember that our firat Little Egret had, at first, all olive-yellow lores.) We have stil not solved the identity of the other small egret. The twosome was photographed by the Reids on the 16th. I suppose it is not impossible that two of these Old-World invaders could have migrated n. from the Caribbean to connsider breeding here. (We're at the latitude of s. France, where they breed, and one summered for some years in our briefly established Showny Egret colony on Bon Portage I.} Cheers, Ian
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