Last year this time there were often well over 20 Great Egrets roosting in the trees in Longmeadow, MA at the Fanny Stebbins wildlife refuge. This year you can count on seeing one or two of the big water birds but nothing like last year. A fellow birder postulated that, with the extreme abundance of water everywhere, the egrets and herons weren’t reliant on this one place to the same extent. I felt a little less depressed after that conversation.
This week, away from the ponds, in the flooded farm land, there was one single Snowy Egret with a Great Egret on the other side of the field. I think they were hunting frogs and tadpoles. My first Snowy!
