egrets in our local river

Yesterday afternoon, Paula and I went for a walk down the Ng Tung River, which I usually refer to casually as ‘our local river’. This isn’t as straightforward an endeavour as it was a few years ago, largely because the construction of the so-called ‘Fanling North Bypass’ blocks progress down the one-time Drainage Services access road that once ran alongside the north bank of the river. We were on our way home when I spotted a large number of egrets through the space underneath one of the footbridges across the river:

You probably can’t see anything on this photo, so here is an enlarged version of the relevant part of the picture:

I took the next photo from the footbridge:

…followed by a series of shots as I walked along the makeshift temporary road that runs along the south bank of the river:

That was yesterday, and this morning, when walking back home from Luen Wo Hui, I reached the temporary road slightly further downstream than usual and saw another spectacular gathering of egrets:

The bridge that you can see in this photo will eventually carry the ‘bypass’.

And this a closer view of the concentration of egrets in the bottom right-hand corner of the previous photo:

I walk along the river frequently, but most of the time I don’t see any egrets, or at most two or three. Where do they go when they’re not in the river? Surely they need to feed, and there are a lot of fish in this river. I hope to find out the answer to this conundrum eventually.