ML647769159

Detalles de la observación

Mind blowing. Saw a couple large flocks of REEG while driving in so made a plan to walk out and get some footage/quality count. When I got out to the close group (located at 25.973515,-97.224671), all of the other birds were finishing trickling in to join this group, creating a superflock. The flock was actively foraging and would repeatedly start to spread out before grouping up tight together after a portion of the flock found a good batch of prey. This made counting a bit tricky, but I got a rough count of nearly 750 birds initially. After an hour or so of following the main flock around as it dispersed and grouped up, the birds decided to take a break in shallow water on the edge of an island. I got a clean 15-20 minutes of almost no birds moving around, allowing for an extremely accurate count of each morph separately - 323 white morph, 658 dark morph, totaling 981 reddish in this flock. Holy ****. After the 15-20 minute break, birds quickly funneled out to a new location 1/4 mile away, then to another location 1/2 mile away, so I gave up on the flock. I did a couple fairly thorough passes looking for bands during the encounter and was able to read a few, but unfortunately wasnt able to verify that there weren't others. I wouldnt be surprised if there were at least 1-2 more banded birds in the flock but could be more. Bands will be reported. Dark morph white A59 White morph red 0A8 White morph red 7A9 After getting back to my truck and driving up the road a mile, there was another flock of REEG right next to the road. Im certain this was an entirely different group of birds based on location (as well as color morph ratio). This flock had 22 white morphs and 151 dark morphs, totaling 173 more birds. This new total of 1154 birds stands as the new eBird world count for Reddish Egret, blowing the water out of the prior high count of 739 birds that I observed just a mile or so away from this location in Dec 2023 (also during this CBC). Even the superflock alone surpassed the old high count by a significant margin. Fun!