Great White Egret

The Great White Egret is a tall, slender, all-white heron, about the size of a Grey Heron and far bigger than a Little, Cattle or Snowy Egret. It has a long, S-shaped neck, a long, straight, dagger-like bill and long dark legs. For most of the year the bill is yellow, and the line of the mouth runs back to below or just behind the eye. It never has plumes on its head or chest.

In North America the same bird is called the Great Egret. It is one species, found on every continent except Antarctica, in four forms that differ mainly in size and in the colour of the bill, face and legs when breeding.^{1, 2}

In the breeding season adults carry 30-50 long, lacy plumes on the back, up to 50 cm (20 in) long, that hang past the tail and are raised and fanned in display. At the height of courtship the bare skin in front of the eye turns bright blue-green or lime green and the bill darkens; once the eggs are laid, bill and face fade back towards yellow.

The colour change differs between the forms. In European birds the bill turns black, sometimes still yellowish at the base, and the upper legs turn yellowish, pink or reddish. In American birds the bill becomes brighter orange-yellow, sometimes with black along the top, the face lime green, and the legs stay black. A black-billed Great White Egret seen in Britain in spring is simply a European bird in breeding dress.

Males and females look alike at all ages, though males average a little bigger. Young birds look like non-breeding adults, without back plumes, and the yellow bill has a blackish tip.

A Great White Egret is 80-104 cm (31-41 in) long, with a wingspan of about 140-170 cm (55-67 in), and weighs about 1 kg (2.2 lb), anywhere from 700 g to 1.7 kg (1.5-3.75 lb). European birds are the largest: the other three forms average about 15-17% smaller, so American birds run a little smaller than the British ones.¹

Little Egret. The commonest white egret in Britain is much smaller, with a black bill, black legs and yellow feet, faster wingbeats, and, when breeding, two long plumes on the nape. A Great White Egret has a yellow bill for most of the year, dark feet rather than bright yellow ones, no nape plumes and slower wingbeats. See the Little Egret.

Cattle Egret. Far smaller, with a yellow bill and yellowish or greyish legs, and often feeds among cattle or sheep. See the Cattle Egret.

Great White Heron. In south Florida and the Caribbean, the white form of the Great Blue Heron is bigger, with pinkish-yellow legs and a few plumes on the head.

Snowy Egret. In the Americas, the Snowy Egret is much smaller, with a black bill.

Intermediate-type egrets. In Africa, Asia and Australia these are somewhat smaller; their gape stops below the eye, the bill and neck are stouter, the legs proportionally shorter, and they often grow chest plumes when breeding.

Away from its colony the Great White Egret is mostly silent. A disturbed or flushed bird gives a harsh, croaking call, and it calls harshly when squabbling with other waterbirds. Colonies are noisy, with a constant mix of croaks, gurgles and bill snaps from several species.

Four main call types have been described: a gurgling, vibrating rattle of well-spaced notes, about 15 a second and lasting half a second to a second; a raucous "rraah" with the notes run together; a nasal version of it; and a short "kok"; American birds apparently never give the rattle, which is the commonest call of European, African and Asian birds; they mostly use the "rraah" and a very nasal call.¹ At the nest, pairs greet each other with a loud, two-note "arre-arre", and a displaying male ends one of his displays with a loud snap of the bill.

Until the end of the 20th century the Great White Egret was a very rare visitor to Britain, but numbers rose sharply in the 2000s.¹ In 2012 Great White Egrets nested in the reedbeds of Shapwick Heath National Nature Reserve on the Somerset Levels, the first confirmed breeding in Britain; the female had been ringed as a chick in western France in 2009 and had wandered to Lancashire, Wales and Gloucestershire before settling in Somerset in 2010.³ That year two pairs fledged four young.⁴

The Avalon Marshes in Somerset are still the stronghold, and the species has spread to Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Wiltshire, Cheshire and beyond.⁵ In 2024 the Rare Breeding Birds Panel counted 153 confirmed breeding pairs, and up to 164, at 20 sites, a new record, including the first confirmed nest in Scotland.⁶

You can now see Great White Egrets in Britain all year, at reedbeds, flooded grasslands, lakes and estuaries, especially in southern England. They are most likely to be seen in winter, but many southern sites have them all year.⁷

Ringing shows where some of them come from. Of 159 reports in Britain and Ireland of Great White Egrets ringed abroad, 126 involved birds ringed in France, 19 in Lithuania and 10 in Belarus.⁸ A nestling ringed in Hungary in May 2024 turned up in Lincolnshire 13 months later, about 1,500 km (930 miles) from its nest, and a nestling from Poland in 2025 reached Suffolk within six months, and young birds raised in Somerset have wandered as far as East Lothian and County Antrim.⁸

In North America the Great Egret is common and widespread. It breeds mainly in the south-east and along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, with colonies scattered inland and in the west north to southern Canada. Birds from the north move south for the winter, and in average winters it stays north to western Oregon, California, the southern states and the coasts of North Carolina, Virginia and New Jersey; more stay north in mild winters.

After breeding, from June to October and especially in August and September, young birds wander widely, often north of where they were raised, so Great Egrets turn up well away from the colonies before heading south.

Few herons range as widely as the Great White Egret. It is found across Europe and Asia, in Africa south of the Sahara, from southern Canada to Argentina and Chile, and in Australia and New Zealand. Birds in the tropics and mild regions mostly stay put; northern breeders migrate. European birds mostly move no great distance, south or west, in autumn, peaking in October. Until the 1980s they wintered mainly around the Mediterranean; now many winter across western Europe.¹

Fish are the main food, but the Great White Egret is an opportunist that takes whatever it can catch and swallow in and around shallow water: frogs and tadpoles, crayfish and shrimps, water beetles, dragonfly larvae, grasshoppers, snakes and lizards, small mammals such as voles, rats and moles, and now and then a small bird. Most fish are small, a few centimetres long.

In some places voles matter more than fish. In a lagoon study in north-east Italy small mammals were its most important food in every month, ahead of fish¹, and in a Dutch river valley the number of egrets wintering rose with the vole supply, from about two birds per 100 ha in average years to eight in good vole years.⁹ In winter they often hunt in wet fields, meadows and ditches as well as along open water.

It hunts much like a Grey Heron: walking slowly through shallow water, 60-90% of the time, or standing still with the neck stretched, then striking with the bill; just before striking it often sways its head from side to side, probably to judge the distance to its prey.¹ Its long legs let it wade deeper than smaller egrets. Now and then it also hovers to pick fish from the surface, plunges and swims after prey, or stirs the water to flush prey out. It has even been seen dropping bread into the water and catching the fish that came to it.¹

Most birds feed alone and defend a feeding spot, but where food is plentiful they gather in tens or even hundreds, often with other herons, and steal prey from other birds when they can. Prey is shaken until still, large items may be dipped in water, and fish are swallowed head first.

Great White Egrets nest in colonies, often with other herons, egrets, cormorants and spoonbills. In western Europe nests are usually in large reedbeds; elsewhere they are mostly high in trees or bushes over water or on islands, where predators on the ground cannot easily reach them. In mixed colonies it is often the first to settle. The nest is a flimsy platform of sticks, about 0.5-1 m (20-40 in) across, lined with softer plants. The male starts building it before he has a mate; the pair then finish it together, or the female builds with sticks he brings.

In Europe most eggs are laid from mid-April to May. A clutch is usually three or four pale greenish-blue eggs, sometimes one to six. Both parents incubate, for 23-27 days, starting with the first egg, so the chicks hatch a day or more apart. Pairs raise one brood a year and may lay again if they lose their eggs early.

Both parents feed the chicks by bringing up small fish. Because the chicks hatch days apart, the oldest are bigger, and they fight for food; in broods of three or four the elder chicks sometimes peck the youngest to death, which is called siblicide. In one Texas colony, elder chicks could intercept most of the food from about two weeks old, because the fish were small enough for one chick to monopolise, and siblicide was recorded in about one in five nests in a census sample and in 9 of 17 nests watched closely.¹⁰ Even so, broods of three or four produced more young that survived to 25 days than smaller broods did.^{1, 11}

The young may start clambering out of the nest at about three weeks, fly short distances at about 40 days and longer flights at 49-60 days, and are independent at about 62-67 days.¹

In flight a Great White Egret looks huge and white, with its neck folded back into the shoulders and its long dark legs trailing well beyond the tail, on slow, steady wingbeats, about two a second. Cruising speeds of 35-50 km/h (22-31 mph) have been measured.¹ On the ground it walks with the neck stretched out, and in the colony it hops and clambers through the branches using its bill and wings.

It spends much of the day feeding, with breaks of an hour or two for resting and preening, and roosts at night in trees or reedbeds, often with other herons and egrets, leaving at sunrise and returning just before sunset.

Pairs form for a single season; nobody yet knows whether the same birds pair again in later years. A male claims a display branch at the nest site and shows off to passing females: stretching his neck straight up with the bill pointed skyward, lowering his head over the edge of the nest with a loud snap of the bill, shaking twigs, and raising and fanning his plumes. Once a female is accepted, he brings her sticks, and the pair greet each other with neck stretches and calls each time one returns to the nest.

Few Great White Egrets have been followed for long, but the ringing records show they can live for more than 20 years. The oldest on the USGS Bird Banding Laboratory's list was banded as a chick in Ohio in June 1947 and recorded as taken illegally, dead, in Ohio in April 1970: 22 years 10 months.¹² In Europe, the oldest on EURING's list was a German-ringed bird found dead at 20 years 6 months, and the next a French bird killed on a road at 18 years 6 months; EURING counts age from the likely hatching year, a minimum for a bird ringed full-grown.¹³

Britain's population is too young to hold an old record yet. The oldest on the BTO's list is a male ringed as a nestling in Somerset in May 2016 and seen alive, from his colour rings, in September 2025, 9 years 3 months 24 days later (this list gives the time since ringing).¹⁴ Older birds visit: a Great White Egret ringed as a chick at Lac de Grand-Lieu in France in May 2003 was seen alive at Blashford Lakes, Hampshire, in August 2018, 15 years 2 months 28 days later.⁸

Many young birds die in their first year. Chicks in the nest are lost to siblicide, starvation and storms, and predators take eggs and young: crows and ravens, gulls, owls and hawks, and in America raccoons and, where chicks fall into the water, alligators. Large eagles occasionally take them in Africa.

Worldwide the Great White Egret is rated Least Concern. In the UK it is on the Amber list of Birds of Conservation Concern, not because it is declining but because so few breed or winter here; the same small numbers put its breeding population in the Endangered category of the Great Britain Red List.¹⁵ Both lists date from 2021, and the breeding population has grown fast since.

In North America it is common, and has increased over the long term. The North American Breeding Bird Survey found an average rise of 1.0% a year from 1966 to 2025 (95% credible interval 0.3 to 1.8), though numbers have dipped slightly since a peak in 2008, with no clear trend over the last ten years.¹⁶ Partners in Flight estimates about 710,000 in the US and Canada, a figure dated to around 2010.¹⁷

In the late 1800s and early 1900s the species came close to disappearing from much of its range.¹ Its long breeding plumes were sold for hats as "aigrettes" or "ospreys".¹⁸ Campaigners of the time described egrets shot for their plumes at the nesting colonies, and the chicks left to starve.¹⁹ Killing for the trade, mainly between 1870 and 1910, cut North American numbers by more than 95%; by 1911-12 the total known to nest in the United States was perhaps only 1,000-1,500 pairs. In Europe, drainage, flood control and hunting for plumes drove a steep fall in the late 1800s.¹

The trade helped start organised bird protection. In Britain, Emily Williamson founded the Society for the Protection of Birds in 1889 to fight the fashion for feathers, and Eliza Phillips and Etta Lemon soon joined her; it received a Royal Charter in 1904, and Parliament's 1921 Importation of Plumage (Prohibition) Act came into force in 1922.²⁰ In the United States, George Bird Grinnell set up the first Audubon Society in 1886.²¹ In Boston in 1896 Harriet Hemenway and Minna B. Hall persuaded women to give up feathered hats and founded the Massachusetts Audubon Society.²² The National Association of Audubon Societies followed in 1905, and in 1953 the National Audubon Society took a flying Great Egret, a species among the worst hit by the plume hunters, as its symbol.²³ Protection under state plumage laws and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 brought a quick recovery from the 1920s.¹

Its later spread across Europe, from the Netherlands in 1978 to Britain in 2012, has been linked to better legal protection, milder winters and new wetlands such as reservoirs and rice fields¹, though the main drivers are still unclear.⁷

In Great Britain, like all wild birds, the Great White Egret, its nest while in use or being built, and its eggs are protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, which makes it an offence intentionally to harm them, and in Scotland recklessly too; it is not on Schedule 1, the list of birds protected from disturbance at the nest.²⁴ Northern Ireland gives the same protection, also covering reckless acts, under the Wildlife (Northern Ireland) Order 1985.²⁵ In the United States it is on the list of birds protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which makes it unlawful to kill, take, possess or sell the birds, their feathers, nests or eggs except as allowed by regulations.²⁶ In Canada it is protected under the Migratory Birds Convention Act, 1994.²⁷