Great Egret

I have seen great egrets daily. Lots of them. They're everywhere. So I thought I'd wait until the last day to blip one. And then of course this morning it was very windy, and very cool, and there wasn't a great egret to be found on the way to the beach! Fortunately, I found this one on the way back.

I also saw - at a great distance - a huge flock of mostly snowy egrets with a couple of white ibises in it. Yesterday from the car I saw a huge flock of white ibises eating in someone's backyard! 

Also from a great distance - way back from the beach while we were doing our beach walk/trash pick-up thing - I took a photo of a crow sized bird not knowing what it was, but assuming it was in fact a crow. When I looked at it on the computer and cropped the photo to see it damned if it doesn't look like it was a merlin! Well well! A nice thing to find.

The extras are the group of snowy egrets - the grey job in the middle with its wings out is a juvenile white ibis - and the merlin.