May as well keep the hail and birds thread going.
Egret breeding colonies are particularly susceptible to storms. It was
(and certainly still is) a fairly regular occurrence for egret
(predominantly Cattle Egret) colonies on the NSW north coast to suffer
major losses as a result of storms. One incident that I remember well
resulted in the local wildlife carer group raising hundreds of young egrets
recovered from the ground after the colony was hit by a severe storm. (Why
they should, or shouldn't, do this I won't enter into). Other colonies
that I was studying at the time were also affected at some time in the nine
years that I watched them.
I remember visiting a breeding colony of about 5000 pairs of Intermediate
Egrets in the Gingham Watercourse, west of Moree, NSW (inland northern NSW)
in 1996 (from memory). A severe hailstorm had passed through the area
about three to four weeks previously doing quite a bit of damage. Many
trees in the colony were sheered off. There were quite a lot (dozens) of
adult Intermediate Egrets moving about the trees with one or both wings
broken by the large hail stones that accompanied the storm. It was
obviously that there was plenty of food around and that these birds would
survive until the wetland dried up. Of considerable interest was that many
of these birds were in courting condition, ie, flushed red bill and green
face, probably as a result of earlier nesting attempts failing during the
storm. It would have been very interesting, but not possible at the time,
to monitor the breeding success of these birds.
David Geering
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