The aim of this book is to make Australian herons, egrets and bitterns better
understood and more appreciated by bird watchers, students and indeed anyone
who has a particular admiration for these striking members of our avian fauna
and a concern for their long-term survival. Unless otherwise indicated, in what
follows ‘heron’ will collectively refer to all three of these members of the family
Ardeidae. This book is certainly overdue. In fact, it is more than 30 years since,
at the first campout of the Queensland Ornithological Society (now Birds
Queensland), Dr Doug Dow alerted me to the need for monographs on
Australian bird families. Since then some excellent field guides and beautifully
illustrated bird books have been published and there is a wealth of detailed technical
information on many of our bird species in the volumes of the Handbook
of Australian, New Zealand and Antarctic Birds (HANZAB) (Marchant and
Higgins 1990 and subsequent authors). However, there is still a dearth of books
that focus on families of Australian birds with the aim of making the facts and
principles of their biology and conservation accessible to a wide readership. It
seems the germ of the idea of writing such a book lay dormant in my mind all
these years, but now, after decades of research into the Cattle Egret and shorter
forays into the field studying other species of herons, I feel I have sufficient depth
and breadth of knowledge to be comfortable with the idea of producing a book
that looks comprehensively at the Australian members of the family Ardeidae.
Nevertheless I am very conscious of my limited field experience of many of our
ardeids and gratefully make use of what others have published and told me,
while accepting the reality that a number of our heron species have hardly been
studied at all.