Breakfast at Sandals Negril includes a healthy serving of cattle egrets that have learned to wait, just a few feet from your table, for you to push away from the table with food left on your plate. Occasionally they will even try to help themselves to your scrambled eggs while you are “still working on that” (a particularly disliked form of a question that wait staff have taken to asking when they are unsure as to whether you are finished your meal. A meal that, I would imagine, the chefs are proud of. So reducing my enjoyment of the chef’s work to something that is a chore and must be ‘worked on’ seems a little depreciating, don’t you think?). The egrets fight each other for position on the table which results in lightening fast lunges, stabs and swallows. We witnessed one egret pick up an entire link sausage from a plate and swallow it whole as if it was a slippery minnow. From what we could tell the sausage initially got lodged in the birds long neck which resulted in a linear bulge in its throat that made the neck look somewhat dislocated. We assumed that Darwinian evolution being what it is many generations of egrets have thrived on sausages scavenged from breakfast plates on the deck of Bayside Restaurant act Sandals. We were entertained by their company which added to our enjoyment of the terrific food that required no work to savor.
