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Little Egret Egretta garzetta Scientific name definitions

Steven G. Mlodinow, Guy M. Kirwan, and Peter Pyle
Version: 2.0 — Published March 29, 2024
Revision Notes

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Introduction

The Little Egret is a sleek, graceful heron that occurs across much of Eurasia, Africa, and Australia. The widespread nominate subspecies, E. g. garzetta, and the Australasian subspecies, E. g. nigripes, have only a white morph (except for a tiny number of garzetta). The coastal east-African, E. g. dimorpha, is appropriately dimorphic, with a dark and white morph. During the breeding season, the Little Egret is quite showy, if often monochromatic, due to two long lanceolate plumes from the nape, as well as shorter denser lanceolate plumes from the lower neck, and fluffy filamentous plumes from the scapulars.

During the late nineteenth century, these plumes were more valuable than gold. When smuggled into Europe they fetched £15 an ounce (about £875 at 2000 prices), with each individual producing about 1 gram of plumes (1). Fortunately, its plumes are no longer a commodity, and Little Egret is increasingly common through much of its range, with an estimated global population (circa year 2000) of 660,000 to 3,150,000 birds (2).

The Little Egret can be found in a wide variety of wetlands, including the shallow margins of lakes and rivers, saltwater and freshwater marshes, flooded meadows, rice fields, mudflats, mangrove swamps, sandy beaches, and rocky shoreline (3, 4). It takes a wide range of prey items, including small fish, amphibians, crustaceans, insects, small birds, small mammals, and other similarly sized prey. It hunts using a variety of strategies; from standing absolutely still with head cocked and ready to strike, to prancing about with wings open and bill pointed downwards (5). Habitat loss resulting from the destruction of natural wetlands has been somewhat countered by the Little Egret's adaptability, as it seems equally able to utilize anthropogenic habitats like rice fields and fish ponds.

The Little Egret undergoes extensive post-breeding dispersal between July and September, and is also a short- to medium-distance partial migrant. The northernmost breeding populations move south from late August into November and back north during March and April (6, 4). The species also has a propensity to wander, with records from as far afield as Buldir Island in Alaska's Aleutian Islands (7), the Saint Peter and Saint Paul Archipelago 940 kilometers northeast of Brazil (8, 9), and Aruba in the central Caribbean (10, 11). Its history in the Western Hemisphere is particularly notable: it was first recorded there in 1954 in Barbados (12) and Newfoundland (13) and during the ensuing 25 years, three more were found in the Western Hemisphere, all of which had been banded in western Spain the previous summer: Trinidad in 1957, Martinique in 1962, and Suriname in 1969 (14, 15, 16). Then, none were detected during the 1970s, but in the 1980s, 14 were found from eastern Canada to Trinidad (17). Records accrued at an increasing rate through the 1990s, especially on Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago (17), and in 1994, the Little Egret was recorded nesting on Barbados (18) with 15 to 25 pairs nesting annually there from 1997 through 2006 (19) and likely through 2020 (E. Massiah, personal communication). Additionally, three pairs were found nesting on Antigua in the northern Lesser Antilles in March 2008 (20).

Despite its abundance, charisma, and tendency to roam, the Little Egret is, perhaps, best known for taxonomic controversy. There are five closely related Old World taxa that have been combined in a variety of ways by various authors over the last hundred years: Egretta garzetta (throughout much of Europe, southern Asia, and Africa); Egretta gularis (along the coastline of much of western Africa); Egretta schistacea (from the Middle East and eastern Africa east to portions of the eastern Indian coast); Egretta dimorpha (Madagascar, the Seychelles, and eastern Africa from Mozambique to Kenya); and Egretta nigripes (from Indonesia and the Philippines south to Australia and New Zealand). In the 1930s, these five taxa were placed into three species, the Little Egret (garzetta, dimorpha, and nigripes), the Western Reef-Heron (gularis), and the Eastern Reef-Heron (schistacea) (21, 22). Subsequently, they were combined in a number of ways that resulted in one species (23, 3, 24, 25) or in two or three species (26, 27, 28). Though controversy certainly still exists, the prevailing current taxonomy combines these five into two species; the Little Egret (Egretta garzetta) (consisting of garzetta, dimorpha, and nigripes), and the Western Reef-Heron (Egretta gularis) (consisting of gularis and schistacea) (29).

Distribution of the Little Egret - Range Map
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  • Year-round
  • Migration
  • Breeding
  • Non-Breeding
Distribution of the Little Egret

Recommended Citation

Mlodinow, S. G., G. M. Kirwan, and P. Pyle (2024). Little Egret (Egretta garzetta), version 2.0. In Birds of the World (B. K. Keeney and N. D. Sly, Editors). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.2173/bow.litegr.02
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