Beach birds: great egrets

At dawn, great egrets (Ardea alba) soar down from roosts in the trees beneath my balcony and line up on the foreshore to perform their morning ablutions. How do they stay so clean yet I can't wear a white t-shirt for more than a minute without getting tomato sauce over it? (Even when I'm not eating tomato sauce, near someone else eating it or, indeed, within cooee of a bottle. It just happens.)