#65 Little Egret by Vaughan Grantham
Meet Vaughan Grantham, local naturalist and retired local authority biodiversity officer!
Vaughan grew up in East Yorkshire and first became interested in birds as a young teenager on family holidays to the Yorkshire coast. His interest soon expanded to include butterflies and any other wildlife he could attempt to identify. His conservation career began with long-term volunteering on RSPB reserves followed by two species protection contracts. He then did an Environmental Management degree as a mature student. After graduating he volunteered with BTCV (as it was called then) and then Lancashire Wildlife Trust. He began working as a local authority ecologist with Greater Manchester Ecology Unit in 1998, then moved to a similar role in Cardiff in 2001 where he late became an environmental Team Leader. After a year in Worcestershire County Council as an environmental Team Leader in 2009 he moved back to East Yorkshire to take up the post of Biodiversity Officer in East Riding Council in 2010. He chaired the East Riding Local Wildlife Sites (LWS) panel from 2014 until his retirement in September 2023 but continues to sit on the East Riding LWS panel. He is a strong supporter of LWS systems which he was responsible for in all his local authority ecology roles. During his career his areas of ecological interest expanded to include amphibians, dragonflies, crickets, waxcaps and plants. He is also interested in habitats and their management, particularly in the context of historic changes to landscapes. He is spending his retirement further developing his knowledge of wildlife and focussing on wildlife photography, especially birds.
Little Egret at Holgate Beck, Hob Moor (c) Vaughan Grantham
Vaughan’s chosen species is the Little Egret Egretta garzetta, a small heron with all white plumage like its larger cousin the Great Egret Area alba. Little Egrets have a blackish bill and black legs with conspicuous yellow feet, whereas Great Egrets have a pale yellowish-orange bill and all black legs and feet. In the spring, Little Egrets and other egrets grow long plumes on their mantles which they use for display during countship.
They feed primarily on fish but also eat amphibians and aquatic invertebrates. They often feed by stalking their prey in shallow water and sometimes shuffle their feet to disturb prey. They are found in many different types of water bodies including lakes, ponds, gravel pits, rivers and streams and even quite small ditches, and regularly frequent estuaries. They nest colonially in trees, often with other species of herons.
Today they are a familiar sight on many wetlands and can even be seen on watercourses in urban areas such as York. Its current abundance is the result of a remarkable increase and range expansion during the last 30 years, part of a longer story that has seen dramatic changes in its population and range during the last 600 years.
The first reference to Egrets in North and East Yorkshire is in the list of food for the feast to celebrate the instalment of George Neville as the Archbishop of York in September 1465. The feast was held at Cawood Castle and among the many domesticated and wild animals listed on the menu are 1,000 Egrets. These could have also included Great Egret, but Vaughan believes these are most likely to have been predominantly Little Egrets. Among the other wetland birds served up were 400 Herons, 200 Bitterns, 200 Cranes, 4,000 Mallard and Teal and 400 Swans. To put these species into the context of the feast, it also included 2,000 pigs, 1,000 sheep, 500 Deer, 104 Peacocks and even 12 Porpoises!
Even if these figures are exaggerated, they give us an idea of just how abundant wetland birds were at that time. The marshes adjacent to the rivers Ouse and Derwent and the other rivers flowing into the Humber would have been an extensive area of fen, reedbed and willow swamp. This wild landscape of vast marshlands must have been teeming with birds and other wildlife. The majority of those mediaeval marshes were destroyed by drainage works, mostly during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Little Egrets probably became extinct as a breeding species in Britain in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, through a combination of hunting and habitat loss.
Little Egrets weren’t only hunted for food. Their breeding plumes became very fashionable as adornment for lady’s hats, especially during the nineteenth century when many millions of birds were killed across Europe. Their lowest population probably ebb was probably during the early twentieth centuries, by which time they were confined to southern Europe. Fortunately, fashions changed, and Little Egrets gained some protection and their populations slowly started to recover.
Little Egret (c) Mervin Nethercoat, YNU Flickr
The first officially accepted record of Little Egret in Yorkshire was from Paull, near Hull in 1826 with the next in 1840, but the third Yorkshire record was not until 1967. The population and range of the species in France expanded during the post war period. This led to an increase in records in Britain during the 1980’s when it became an annual visitor. There was a big increase in records during the early 1990’s and it bred for the first time in Britain in Dorset in 1996. Although initially most British records were from the south coast, they began to spread north and there were several records in Yorkshire during the 1980’s. It became an annual visitor to the county in the 1990’s although usually only a few records each year, mostly brief visits in spring. The turn of the century saw a dramatic increase in records starting with 20 in 2000 and then 53 in 2001. From then on it became ever more numerous with birds occurring at most wetland sites many of which are managed as nature reserves. They also stayed much longer and were present in all seasons. They first bred in Yorkshire in 2009 when a pair fledged two young in the Lower Derwent Valley near Wheldrake. The breeding population in Yorkshire reached 25 pairs in 2017 and has continued to increase.
So, the Little Egret is a modern success story. The dramatic increase in its population and expansion of its range is due to its protection and the creation and management of wetland reserves. It’s a beautiful addition to our county avifauna and great to see such an elegant bird grace our countryside again. It is always delight at seeing them on the becks within the City of York, thankfully no long food for the Archbishop!
Recording and monitoring
The Yorkshire Naturalists’ Union’s annual bird reports record the continuing increase of the population in Yorkshire. The BTO undertakes a Heronry Census annually which records (along with Grey Heron, Cormorants, and other species) Little Egret breeding populations which reached 1,100 pairs in 2017. Volunteers can adopt sites to monitor as part of this survey.
Further information and acknowledgements
NEYEDC would like to thank Vaughan for his time and expertise in helping to create this blog.