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Great Egret Was Photographed on Remote Trindade Island 1,140 km from Brazil’s Mainland Coast

Great egret standing in shallow water in the Pantanal, Brazil
Research · Ecology

A great egret (Ardea alba) was photographed on Trindade Island in the South Atlantic, about 1,140 kilometres from the Brazilian mainland. An author-posted preprint documenting the observation was uploaded on 6 June 2026. The manuscript has not yet undergone peer review.

The bird was observed on 18 July 2025 near the Tunnel area on Trindade Island. Researchers photographed a single adult in non-breeding plumage between 09:25 and 09:39, first resting and scanning shallow coastal water on a sandy stretch near Praia Vermelha and later moving onto rocky outcrops as people approached.

The authors identified the bird from its characteristic all-white plumage, yellow bill, dark legs and overall morphology. They also reviewed published information on the island’s birds and searched eBird, WikiAves, iNaturalist and GBIF to evaluate whether the record had been documented previously.

A great egret had been mentioned from Trindade in an avifaunal survey based on observations made in 1989, but that report contained neither photographs nor a detailed morphological description. The 2025 observation therefore represents the first photographic documentation of the species on the island according to the authors.

Trindade is an isolated volcanic island in the South Atlantic. The authors interpret the occurrence as vagrancy — an individual appearing far outside its usual range — and highlight it as evidence of the long-distance dispersal capacity of great egret. They suggest that strong winds or a storm from the Brazilian coast could have contributed, but did not reconstruct the bird’s route or demonstrate a particular weather event. They also point to remote oceanic islands as useful locations for detecting rare dispersal events and changes in bird occurrence.

Sources and image credit

  1. Dalbó, G. Z., Otegui, M. B. P., Alves, M. M., & Costa, M. B. (2026, June 6). First documented record with photographic evidence of the Great Egret (Ardea alba) on Trindade Island, South Atlantic Ocean [Preprint]. ResearchGate. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.20120.97285Author-posted CC BY 4.0 preprint uploaded 6 June 2026. It documents a great egret photographed on Trindade Island on 18 July 2025, around 1,140 km from the Brazilian mainland, and describes it as the first photographic documentation of the species on the island after an earlier 1989 mention without photographs or detailed morphological documentation.

Image: Charles J. Sharp / Wikimedia Commons — Great Egret (Ardea alba) photographed in the Pantanal, Brazil, 10 September 2015; representative Brazilian species image, not the Trindade Island bird · CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ · Source

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