It is gregarious and usually associates with cattle and other grazing animals. Their plumage is white, but during the breeding season orange-buff plumes appear on the head, neck, and back.
Cattle egrets are native to Africa and Asia.
The nature and success of their almost worldwide range expansion is dynamic and complex, but well-documented. Although the mechanisms and details of original range expansion are not known, cattle egrets spread from the west coast of Africa in the late 1800s across the Atlantic Ocean to the coastal area of northeastern South America, then northward into North America and the West Indies in the early 1940s and 1950s. Cattle egrets originally entered Texas in 1954, migrating south and west along the Gulf Coast states from initial heronries in Florida. They increased from about ten pairs in the state in 1959 to about 300,000 pairs by 1990. By 1995 they occupied 266 heronries in Texas, mostly along the coast and east of the Balcones Escarpment, but between 1987 and 1995, a few small scattered colonies nested in the South Plains, Trans-Pecos, and Panhandle.