Black-crowned Night-Heron
Nycticorax nycticorax
eBird describes the Black-crowned Night-Heron like this: Stocky heron with neck usually tucked in. Adults overall pale grayish with black cap and back. Red eyes. Juveniles noticeably different, brown and streaky with yellow eyes. Often crouched under overhanging branches during the day. Feeds nocturnally for fish, frogs and other prey. Where it overlaps with Yellow-crowned Night-Heron, note large teardrop-shaped white spots on wing coverts which Yellow-crowned lacks. All About Birds provides this additional descriptive information about the Black-crowned Night-Heron: Black-crowned Night-Herons are stocky birds compared to many of their long-limbed heron relatives. They’re most active at night or at dusk, when you may see their ghostly forms flapping out from daytime roosts to forage in wetlands. In the light of day adults are striking in gray-and-black plumage and long white head plumes. These social birds breed in colonies of stick nests usually built over water. They live in fresh, salt, and brackish wetlands and are the most widespread heron in the world.
I saw seven (six adults and one juvenile) Black-crowned Night-Herons on my January 6, 2021 visit to Alligator Lake in Estero Llano Grande State Park. There were also many Yellow-crowned Night-Herons, which gave me a good opportunity to see and study them side by side. For details of my trip that includes my visit to Alligator Lake, look here. Below are some of the pictures I took that day.
“Cool Facts” About the Black-crowned Night-Heron From All About Birds…
- Scientists find it easy, if a bit smelly and messy, to study the diet of young Black-crowned Night-Herons—the nestlings often disgorge their stomach contents when approached.
- Black-crowned Night Heron nest in groups that often include other species, including herons, egrets, and ibises.
- A breeding Black-crowned Night-Heron will brood any chick that is placed in its nest. The herons apparently don’t distinguish between their own offspring and nestlings from other parents.
- Young Black-crowned Night-Herons leave the nest at the age of 1 month but cannot fly until they are 6 weeks old. They move through the vegetation on foot, joining up in foraging flocks at night.
- The familiar evening sight and sound of the Black-crowned Night-Heron was captured in this description from Arthur Bent’s Life Histories of North American Marsh Birds: “How often, in the gathering dusk of evening, have we heard its loud, choking squawk and, looking up, have seen its stocky form, dimly outlined against the gray sky and propelled by steady wing beats, as it wings its way high in the air toward its evening feeding place in some distant pond or marsh!”
- The oldest Black-crowned Night-Heron on record was a female who was at least 21 years, 5 month old.