The State of Georgia has done an exemplary job of preserving its tidal wetlands. According to the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, there are about 350,000 acres of estuarine tidal marsh. These wetlands are a haven for wildlife, and among the most striking and beautiful are the numerous wading birds: herons, ibis, wood storks, and spoonbills, that depend on Georgia wetlands to feed and to nurture their young.
Lovely snowy egrets (photo of a snowy hunting for fish on a Sapelo Island mud flat at low tide, note the yellow feet) are named for their long plumes of feathers (aigrettes in French) that the males display during breeding season. Egrets were hunted nearly to extinction in the late 1890s and early 1900s; their feathers were in high demand to adorn ladies' hats. Luckily, the nascent Audubon Society and President Theodore Roosevelt acted to end the killing of egrets and to create sanctuaries for these and other birds around the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts. When we lived on Sapelo, our family enjoyed watching a flock of snowy egrets fly to their evening roost on a small pine tree in a pond on the south end of the island.
The large, distinctive wood stork, the only stork native to North America, breeds in a number of established rookeries in protected wetland forests along the coast. The first documented wood stork nest was on Blackbeard Island just north of Sapelo in 1965; since then up to 1400 pairs of wood storks have bred in Georgia. These colonies have helped this majestic bird escape extinction due to loss of habitat in other parts of its nesting range.
Wood stork colony at Harris Neck National Wildlife Refuge on the Georgia Coast. "Mycteria americana -Harris Neck National Wildlife Refuge, Georgia, USA -nests-8" by Becky Skiba of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Southeast Region - Colonial nesters Uploaded by snowmanradio. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Another heron common in Georgia is an immigrant. Cattle egrets are just a bit smaller than snowy egrets and have a yellow bill. In breeding season, adults sport reddish-orange patches on the head, breast, and shoulders. Cattle egrets are native to Africa, where they follow gazelles, zebras, and wildebeest, feeding on insects the grazers stir up from the grass. Somehow, early in the twentieth century, cattle egrets managed to cross the Atlantic Ocean to South America, likely riding equatorial trade winds. They readily adapted to life in pastures with domestic cattle, and gradually worked their way northward to the United States. In a brief note to the ornithological journal Oriole, John Teal recorded the precise date that cattle egrets were first spotted on the Georgia coast: June 6, 1956. On that day he saw two adults and a juvenile stalking behind The R.J. Reynolds' herd of cows in an open field on Sapelo Island. Teal and other ecologists had been on the lookout for these avian migrants, which by the 1950s were breeding in Florida, but none were reported in Georgia until that date in 1956. In the summer of 1957, Teal noted several more cattle egrets and observed a nesting pair close to a heron rookery in a pond at the north end of the island. Now cattle egrets are abundant all over the Southeastern U.S. Since there are no longer herds of cows on Sapelo, the egrets now hunt crabs and grasshoppers in salt marsh meadows.
Cattle egret in breeding plumage. "Red-flush Cattle Egret" by su neko - Cattle Egret. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons -
Wading birds delight birdwatchers, and bird watching is important to the tourist economy of coastal Georgia. A Georgia Outdoors video spotlighting the variety and the rookeries of these showy birds can be viewed at: