Great Egret, head and neck

Ardea alba

Great Egret · Everglades National Park · 6 February 2026

A Great Egret head and neck in the Everglades in February, in breeding condition. Great Egrets fish the shallows of every kind of water across the American South and the Everglades is the heart of their range, where the plume trade nearly finished them.

The bare skin between the bill and the eye, the lores, has deepened to a richer green than it shows for most of the year, which alongside the orange-yellow bill and black legs is a reliable seasonal marker for a breeding bird; outside the season the lores are plain yellow. The back-mounted breeding feathers called aigrettes were worth more than their weight in gold to the millinery trade around 1900, and the slaughter of nesting colonies for hat feathers was one of the founding causes of the Audubon movement.