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Ashy-grey Little Egret Photographed Twice at Anasagar Lake

Grey-plumaged Little Egret in Kerala, India
Research · Anatomy & morphology

An unusually coloured little egret (Egretta garzetta) with almost uniformly ashy-grey plumage was photographed at Anasagar Lake in Ajmer, Rajasthan, on 15 December 2025 and again on 29 May 2026. The bird retained the main features of a little egret, including a slender black bill, black legs, yellow feet and elongated plumes.

Instead of the species’ usual white plumage, the head, neck, mantle, wings and underparts were grey to ashy-grey. The colour appeared smooth and broadly symmetrical rather than patchy, and it was seen under bright field conditions on observations more than five months apart.

A dilution-like aberration was the leading explanation

The authors considered the appearance most consistent with a dilution-like plumage aberration, in which altered pigment deposition can give feathers a paler or washed-out colour. They regarded simple staining as less likely because the grey tone was even across the body and lacked the localised marks often produced by mud or algae.

The interpretation remains provisional. No feathers, blood or other biological material were collected, and the bird was not captured or handled. The study therefore could not test the pigmentation directly or identify a genetic cause.

Other explanations could not be ruled out

The authors also discuss dark or intermediate colour-morph expression and possible hybrid origin, particularly involving Indian reef heron (Egretta gularis). Photographs alone could not distinguish conclusively among these alternatives.

The value of the record is therefore the repeated documentation of the same distinctive phenotype rather than a confirmed diagnosis. Two observations separated by more than five months show that the unusual plumage was persistent, but one bird at one lake cannot indicate how frequent such colour variants are in the wider little egret population.

Sources and image credit

  1. Sharma, V., Upadhyay, M., Singh, P., Meena, A., Malik, R., & Khandelwal, K. P. (2026). An Aberrant Ashy-plumaged Little Egret Egretta garzetta in Ajmer, Rajasthan, India. Asian Journal of Research in Zoology, 9(3), 75–80.Primary research report. The same ashy-grey little egret was photographed at Anasagar Lake on 15 December 2025 and 29 May 2026. A dilution-like plumage aberration was considered the leading explanation, but the diagnosis remained provisional because the bird was not sampled or handled.

Image: Afsarnayakkan / Wikimedia Commons — live grey/dark-plumaged little egret at Kattampally, Kerala, India, 22 March 2022; representative unusual-plumage image, not the Anasagar Lake study bird and not evidence of the same cause · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source

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