Cattle Egret sightings bring small tourism boost to town

Rarely seen avian visitors drew at least four visitors to Petersburg last week, as birders from several parts of Alaska came in hopes of catching a sighting of a pair of Cattle Egrets.

The birds, regularly spotted along lawns in town for more than a week, are not a native resident to Alaska, or to the American continents, hailing originally from Africa. They arrived in Florida around 1953, hopping across the continent to California by 1964 and were first seen in southeast Alaskan in 1981, when four birds landed in Ketchikan, according to reports from the University of Alaska, which had two of...