TULALIP — My friend Jerry Solie called me recently with a discovery that was the talk of the neighborhood around Tulalip Bay.
“There’s a white heron in with all the great blue herons and I think it’s an albino,” he said. “Bring your camera.”
Sure enough, when I arrived at a shallow part of Tulalip Bay, there were a half dozen of the stately birds wading in the shallow water and looking for food. One was pure white.
Several residents had hauled out binoculars or cameras. All agreed they had never seen such a bird in the bay.
A quick Google search determined it was not an albino heron, but a great egret, also nicknamed the great white heron. It’s similar to a great blue, but a bit smaller. And it has a yellow bill and dark legs, unlike great blue herons.
Egrets are more common in the warmer climes to the south, but they’re not rare in Washington state, especially in eastern Washington.
Avid birder Maxine Reid of Tulalip said great egrets have occasionally been seen locally, especially during migration periods like now.
Virginia Bound of the Seattle Audubon Society said migration periods are a great time for wildlife watchers to see “oddball birds”.
She said that she had recently seen a great egret on Washington’s coast. Tulalip, she noted, “is a little far north for them.”
But she said it’s not unusual to see birds get caught up with others during migration.
“This is the time of year when a lot of birds are migrating,” she said. “You can get rarities any time of year, but it’s more common (during migration) when they’re just hanging out.”
The egret in Tulalip was one of those birds, hanging out for just a day in Tulalip Bay before moving on.
“It’s unusual but not unheard of,” Bound said of the egret siting.
She noted that many shore birds are migrating right now. While egrets aren’t shore birds, “you get oddball birds with the other masses coming through,” she said.
The Herald’s columnist Sharon Wootton reported last week on a true rarity in the local bird world, a brown booby seen on the Edmonds waterfront. Snohomish County sightings of the bird have only been recorded a handful of times.
Bound noted that since boobies aren’t migratory, the young Edmonds visitor may just have been off course.
“Young birds are more likely to be off kilter,” she said. “They just don’t know where they’re supposed to be going.”
While migration means you’re more likely to see some unusual visitors, it also means it’s time to see some old friends.
Kathleen Snyder of Snohomish County’s Pilchuck Audubon Society, noted that it won’t be long and many birds will be migrating south to Snohomish County.
“There are a lot of winter birds that we’re still waiting for,” Snyder said. “There are masses of ducks that come here.”
In addition to the many ducks, there are thousands of swans and geese, including snow geese that visit from Russia, that spend the winter in north Snohomish County.
She said there are also birds like the varied thrush, a songbird in Northwest forests, that migrate vertically. Common in the Cascade Range, they come down from the mountain tops to spend the winters in warmer temperatures, surviving mostly on berries.
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