Snowy Egret

About the Snowy Egret

The Snowy Egret is the small, dazzling white heron with the "golden slippers" - slim and pure white with a thin black bill, black legs, and startling bright yellow feet, plus a spray of lacy plumes on the head, neck, and back in breeding season. Those plumes nearly doomed it: at the height of the millinery trade around 1900 they were worth more than gold by weight, and the species was hunted to the brink before early conservation laws saved it.

Snowy Egrets are the most animated of the white herons, dashing through shallows, stirring the bottom with those yellow feet to flush prey, and even hovering and dipping over open water. They nest in mixed colonies with other herons and egrets.

In Texas the Snowy Egret is a year-round bird of the coast and a spring-through-fall visitor to inland marshes, ponds, and lakeshores, with a few lingering through mild winters on Central Texas ponds and rivers.