A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
egret
An egret is a white heron, and the distinction is more about custom than about biology. What sets them apart in the breeding season is the plumes: long, fine, straight feathers grown on the back and shoulders and raised in display, so fine that the vane barely holds together. Egrets hunt the same way herons do, standing still in shallow water and striking, and some species stir the bottom with one foot to move prey.
Etymology
The word came into English from French, which had it from an older southern French word for a heron. The same root gives aigrette, which is the French word for the plume itself and then for the spray of feathers or jewels worn on a hat or in the hair. So the bird and the ornament are the same word, and English borrowed it twice, once for each.
Notes
The fashion for aigrettes in the late nineteenth century is the reason the earliest bird-protection societies were founded on both sides of the Atlantic, and the great egret is the emblem of the National Audubon Society for that reason.