UTSW Rookery

Spring 2016 I started visiting the bird rookery at UTSW Medical Center in Dallas, Texas. It was my first time to see a rookery. In this gallery I am attempting to document what takes place in a rookery for each species of aquatic bird that comes here. It has been an amazing journey that I am sharing here. There are 8 species that nest here and I will divide them by species in the order that they show up.

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Pushed Out

Great egrets lay 1 to 6 eggs laid at 2 to 3 days intervals. So the chicks are of varying ages with a big size difference between the oldest and youngest. There is a 76% mortality rate over the first year with most of that coming during the nesting and fledging times. Part of nature's way of keeping the population numbers regulated and increasing the odds that at least one chick makes it for a breeding pair of great egrets. (information source: https://www.beautyofbirds.com/greategrets.html) This photo is of a great egret nestling that most likely was pushed out of the nest by one or more siblings. This was the natural way of things and not caused by human interference so I let it be and documented it. It was hard for me to do but I tasked myself to be objective and non interfering in my project to document the activity during breeding season at this rookery. There are some people that make trips to the rookery for the purpose of finding too young babies on the ground and taking them to a rehabilitator. Didn't know any of them at this time but I do now and would probably let them know if I ran into this again.
Great Egret Nestling (Ardea alba)
UT Southwest Medical Center Rookery

great egret egret white egret aquatic bird aquatic water fowl waders dallas texas ardea alba Rookery Southwest Medical Center Bird Rookery breeding season SMC rookery chick great egret chick egret chick nestling egret nestling great egret nestling fuzzy pushed out likely fatality