This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we’re scoping out the Tricolored Heron (Egretta tricolor).
The Tricolored Heron is a large bird and a medium-large Heron. It’s found year-round throughout the South Carolina Lowcountry as well as the coastal plain of the Eastern United States, from Massachusetts down into Mexico, and beyond. The Tricolored Heron is one of our more colorful herons and is plumed with white across the belly and underwings, a pewter-blue across the back, wings, and neck, and a frayed string of chestnut-brown between their throat and their breastbone. That chestnut returns again, blended into the pewter of the mantle and mane, which are adorned with longer plume-like feathers on adult birds. Juveniles lack these plumes in exchange for heavy chestnut accents along their flanks and all the way up their neck. In the off-season, adults have chartreuse-yellow legs and a dark crimson-red eye behind a patch of golden-yellow skin. In breeding plumage, adults gain white plumes from the back of their head, rosy legs, an intense scarlet eye, and a brilliant sky-blue beak. Like all our Egrets and Herons, Tricolored Herons hunt fish using their long necks, pointed bills, and high-speed pinpoint precision. Tricolored Herons are more active than some of our waders and can often be seen walking slowly through shallow water or sometimes running and chasing fish in very shallow pools. Again like other waders, they are colony nesters and make use of tall-shrubs and low-hanging branches in open swamps over alligator-filled waters, usually alongside several other species of wading birds.
Here’s a quick fun fact. The terms Egret and Heron don’t truly have a deeper scientific meaning. Even though we have a standardized set of common names for bird species, their use is arbitrary and inconsistent. One could argue that members of the genus Ardea are the true Herons and members of Egretta the true Egrets but it is all semantics. Members of one are called the other and we have several other genera that are labelled as one or the other. For example, the Great Blue Heron and Great Egret are both in genus Ardea and at the same time the Snowy Egret is in genus Egretta but so is the Tricolored Heron. We also have the Green Heron, which is a separate genus, and the Cattle Egret, yet another genus. What it all boils down to is that Egrets are pure white in color and Herons are not. Except for the ones that aren’t, like the Little Blue Heron that is snow-white as a juvenile but ocean-blue and faded maroon as an adult. Makes sense given the adult isn’t white. However, the Reddish Egret is also snow-white as a juvenile but becomes faded clay-red and storm-gray as an adult. I guess the most we can say with certainty is all Egrets are all white in at least one stage of their life. (The most used term in applied biology is “it depends” and, as I like to say, “biology is the study of exceptions.”)
