Only the most intrepid Gulf Shores area birders are out in these the hottest months of the year. Those who do venture out get to see the year's hatch fledging and taking first flight.
Paul H. Franklin is a naturalist, photographer and director of Samford University's Samford After Sundown programs. He has written a story for today's Birmingham news about Alabama birding opportunities at this time of year:
Great egrets provide great opportunities for birding
As we pass the Fourth of July, we notice that we have reached a birdlife crossroads of a sort in north-central Alabama. Most of our breeding species have completed their nesting cycle.
For the most part, birds have begun to cease the steady singing you have been hearing for several weeks. Populations of most species seem unusually high, as the young birds have left the nest and are foraging along with the adult birds, and the first of the southbound fall migrant songbirds can be seen.
But even as the first of these northern songbirds appears, there is a simultaneous northbound migration taking place - the post-breeding dispersal of the great waders from the Gulf Coast. The "glory bird" of this dispersal is the wood stork, as it is an endangered species, and rather rare, numbering only about 10,000 in the United States. But a far more common and easily located species is the great egret.
"Egret" is a name applied to (mostly) white species of the heron family that sport showy "nuptial" plumes in late winter and spring. In fact, the word egret comes from the French "aigrette," or plume. And as far as plumage goes, the observer needs something along the lines of a scorecard to identify particular egrets, as they are, as a group, mostly long-legged white birds. Here is a key for identifying the egrets:
Great egret - Yellow bill, all-black legs and feet
Snowy egret - Black bill, black legs with golden slippers (yellow feet)
Reddish egret - Black tip of bill, pink base of bill, blue-grey legs (though in Alabama, virtually all reddish egrets have grey body plumage and reddish-brown neck and head plumage).
Cattle egret - Shorter orange-yellow bill, greenish-brown legs. In late winter and spring, cattle egrets have short buffy crowns and backs.
Once reduced to a remnant population, great egrets have enjoyed a remarkable resurgence in the past few decades. They breed in large mixed colonies of egrets, herons and ibises (called heronries or rookeries) as far north as Montgomery and Eufaula, and are increasingly found in milder winters in north Alabama. Still, the birds may be seen in their greatest abundance in the later summer as the southern birds and their offspring move north. The numbers will stay at or near their peak until late September or early October.
An excellent route to take to see great egrets and other large wading birds is Highway 25 south to Greensboro. As you drive through the Black Belt, look along the banks of catfish and farm ponds. A half-day's drive should produce hundreds of great egrets, as well as cattle egrets, snowy egrets, little blue herons, white ibis and wood storks, as well as the ubiquitous great blue herons.