Egrets' return

I planned to get up before dawn and go up to the bridge to watch the Egrets fly away for the day, but woke up in the middle of the night, couldn't get back to sleep for a while and then overslept. By the time I got there at ten, there wasn't a single Egret on the charco. Then, I walked up the track on the north side, to see how the remodelling of the river bed was progressing.

The heavy bulldozer and excavator have cleared another couple of hundred meters stretch of cane grove from the river bed, and sculpted earth banks five metres high on the south side. Work is now starting on rebuilding collapsed areas of the north bank. How much further cane clearance will go toward the open water of the charco, I won't be here to see. The change is unlikely to show up on Google Earth any time soon.

Following my afternoon walk along the beach and back to get supplies from Mercadona, I returned to the charco bridge, as the sun was disappearing behind the sierras. There were already sixty Egrets settling in for the night in the usual places. I stood there until dusk, and watched another forty odd fly in. Some were on their own, others flew as couple, still others were in nuclear family groups of three to six birds, and then there were a couple of larger groups, ten to twenty in number.

I wonder if this flying pattern reflects the genetic and social relationships? Or is it shaped by their dining habits in distant fields where they forage during the day? Or, is it just random, or a hitherto undiscovered relational pattern?

The more time I spend routinely watching birds, the more I learn, the more I realise I don't know.