Steve
I can confidently say that your Cattle Egrets could have originated from any
of the breeding colonies from northern NSW or southern Qld. I used to
coordinate the tagging of egrets at 13 breeding colonies from Newcastle
north to Bundaberg and out to the Macquarie Marshes. Tagged egrets from all
of these colonies showed up in Victoria and Tasmania each year. The
furthest west we had a tagged bird was Streaky Bay, SA which could well be
near the western limit of where they might be expected. Birds from most
colonies also ended up in New Zealand.
Many tagged birds would return to wintering sites in subsequent years.
There has been very little work done on egrets in northern Australia so it
is uncertain what movement there might be from there into southern
Australia. Obviously some Cattle Egrets must have come south in order to
have colonised NSW in the first place. Just how regular this is and what
number of birds might be involved is beyond us at this stage.
It has become clear that Intermediate Egrets from the Macquarie Marshes, at
least, move north as we had quite a few sightings of tagged birds right up
the coast through Townsville, the Atherton Tableland with four tagged birds
confirmed from Papua New Guinea. Some of these long distance movements
happened within only a month or two of fledging.
Interesting stuff.
David Geering
(who used to work on other things before Regent Honeyeaters)
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