Beautiful day on the river

The humidity broke so after mowing the lawn I rewarded myself with a 4 mile paddle. I only got pictures of the egrets, but I also saw gulls, a cormorant, an osprey, 2 ducks, and 2 ??? (small, speckled brown on top, white on the bottom, pecking in the mud at the edge of the water).



At first I saw a little egret and thought there's probably more than one kind of egret and this is the small kind. But then later upstream I saw what I think of as a normal sized egret (roughly the size of a great blue heron) hanging out with 3 of the small sized ones. So now I wonder if I was seeing families of egrets.