One of the appeals of birding is that you never really know what you are going to see, and that’s particularly true in places that you only occasionally visit, like Colusa NWR.
We went expecting to see hundreds of Snow Geese, and, when I first looked, I thought all those white birds beyond the Great Egret were Snow Geese.
A closer look, though, showed they definitely weren’t Snow Geese. Before taking a closer look on a monitor, I assumed that the smaller ones were Snowy Egrets because the two are commonly seen together. A closer look at the bills made it clear that they weren’t Snowy Egrets, and were, in fact, immature Great Egrets, a bird I’ve never seen before.
If I’d realized that they were juvenile Great Egrets, I might have spent more time studying their behavior, but I quickly shifted my attention to this Snowy Egret and the White-faced Ibis surrounding it.
And because this was the closest I got to White-faced Ibis on this trip, I shifted my focus to trying to get the best shot of them I could get.
Unfortunately, I had to choose between a clear shot of its elegant beak
or the beautiful plumage.
Back at home, looking at the shots Leslie and I took, I wondered for a moment if we had taken them in the same place. It was clear that we had very different experiences there.