No Egrets, Until Now

Got a call early from my sister and have spent the day at Burnham on Crouch with her trying to plan for our mother's care after a bit of a crisis this morning.

We took Clem's dog for a walk along the seawall and saw this little egret. This is a sight I never would have seen when I lived in the area as a child, or when we sailed the Crouch when our children were young. I saw my first egret from a yacht in Turkey in the eighties.

Little egrets, members of the heron family, first came to the UK in significant numbers in 1989 and didn't breed here until 1996. I have shot a roost of them recently in the distance on an island at Glen Faba. This is the first I have captured in flight. It has been gloriously sunny in the Dengie Hundred and Dengie itself today.