One of my favorite places to visit to relax with nature is Assateague Island National Seashore in Maryland. For whatever reason, we starting going in October and have continued this ritual most years for over a decade. I’ll write more about Assateague in a later post so be sure to follow me on social media to know when that one goes live. (Update it’s written – Assateague Island features much more than wild horses)
One of my favorite things about Assateague is the number of birds that congregate in the marshes to fish together. We camp there on the marsh side and if you pick your site correctly you can watch some of these scenes right from your site.
There is just something so exciting to watch as an empty marsh pool is all the sudden full of activity. You can watch one after another as birds fly in to work together for a meal.
There will be great egrets, snowy egrets, little blue herons, tri-colored herons and occasionally a great blue heron mixed in but the great blues seem to like fish alone. And then there are sometimes when other smaller birds like gulls or greater yellowlegs will join in on the feast.
That’s another awesome thing about Assateague Island in that you really never know what you will see at any given moment.
When I’m lucky enough to witness these large group feeding, I love watching what I like to call the ‘dancing egrets’. These egrets and herons run around, jumping and flapping their wings trying to scare the small fish into areas of easy catching.
The dancing continues till about as quickly as they all came they all disappear and move to the next marsh pool and repeat the dancing.
The dancing parties are timed based on the tides in the marsh area. As the tides come in they bring in the small fish then when the tides go out these fish get stuck in pools of water in the marshes. This makes the time after high tide have the most action and it seemed on years when the high tides were early in the morning that the activity was even higher.
By afternoon most of the birds disappear into roosting trees till later in the evening. It’s amazing that hundreds of large birds can literally disappear in a matter of moments.
So my recommendation is that you get out early to watch these gatherings.
If you are lucky enough to see these dances comment below about where and what birds you saw. If you have favorite places for watching this behavior let us know and hey I might just visit and write about your spot.
