Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, Titusville, Florida, USA; FEB 2024
We visited Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge recently where we found large numbers of Great Egrets and Snowy Egrets. The Snowy Egrets were displaying their breeding plumage but only one had a brilliant red Lore, the mask between the beak and eyes. I decided to share that one today. I’ll share the rest in a future post.
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Very beautiful! We have discovered wildlife refuges in the past couple of years. Now we look for them when we go somewhere!
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I look for them everywhere I go too. Merritt Island, near Cape Canaveral, Florida is great in the winter. The Ding Darling refuge on Sanibel Island, Florida was great but I suspect they are still rebuilding from the last hurricane. Bot the Colusa and Sacramento National Wildlife refuges in northern California are great in the winter also.
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I got a little book the “blue goose passport” that lists all (or most) of the reserves, I think it will come in handy. 😊 I bet there are a lot of great ones in Florida! …there are a lot in Texas too.
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I will look for the blue goose passport. I’m always looking for refuge. Have you been to the Staten Island Road near Lodi, Sacramento NWR and Colusa NWR in Northern California? They are both great for winter migrators along the Pacific Flyway. I’ve seen Cackling Geese at Staten Island.
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We did a Highway 1 drive down the CA coast a couple of years ago, but I didn’t even know animal refuges even existed. When we discovered Aransas Nat’l Wildlife Refuge in 2022 that was our first one. I just saw it on the map. It was in 2020 that we started looking for nature areas anywhere we went. I didn’t realize there were so many National Refuges!
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What a beautiful capture. I love egrets. When I lived in Florida I used to photograph egrets hoping to see a Snowy, the red band is something I never saw.
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I love Egrets too. This is the only one I saw with the red lore; the rest that were displaying had the standard yellow lore. I have a friend who is an ornithologist and I am going to ask him to point me to some places where I can get more info about the red lore.
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