Egrets at Columbia Bottoms

This morning, my mom and I drove to Columbia Bottom Conservation Area for the my last birding trip in the St. Louis region for a while. Just north of the city, stacks of shipping containers and freight warehouses transition in just a few miles to the broad floodplains of the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers.  I had never been to the park before, and was impressed with the shorebird, wading bird, and duck diversity that the broad wet meadows and mudflats support. 

After spotting  a few Killdeer and Lesser Yellowlegs foraging in a roadside puddle, we were impressed with a flock of over 200 Great Egrets packed in the tall grasses of a marsh.

Neither of us had seen so many egrets in one place before. We set up a scope to get a closer look and see if any Snowy Egrets were tucked in among the others. (They would have black bills rather than orange.) We didn't see any Snowies, but there were at least two Great Blue Herons strutting around the edges of the flock. You can get a fairly high resolution picture by pressing a camera phone up to a spotting scope, though this picture isn't the best example.

We spooked a few Egrets as we drove by. 

Looking to the other side of the road, we saw a large lake lined with a seemingly endless flock of egrets, at least twice as large as the ones nearer to us. You can see them in the distance of this photo as a line of white on the far side of the lake.

We also found a flock of 150+ ducks beside a smaller group of egrets. In their duller non-breeding plumage, they gave us some trouble in identification, but seeing the band of white on the underside of their wings, dark eyestripe, and blotch of white behind the beak (the last two aren't so easy to see in this picture) allowed us to identify them as Blue-winged Teals. 

We followed the road until it took us to the Missisippi River. An Army Corps of Engineers pumping station had a large scale for reading the flood level. Strange to think that those heights are plausible; the bank in this photo is already 15 feet above the water level. 

Over the last two centuries, engineering projects in general have sought to contain rivers and eliminate floodplains so that they can be settled for homes and farming. The path of the Missouri through the plains used to change drastically year to year as snowmelt and spring rains sprung the river from its banks, reshaping its embankments each season. Millions of amphibians spawned in the huge wetlands created in the thaws, and amphibian predators like the egrets followed in the summer. At Columbia Bottom, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Missouri Department of Conservation have collaborated to restore and protect over 4000 acres of floodplain, allowing us to see a sizable glimpse of an ecosystem type that once stretched for hundreds of miles.