Yellow-crowned Night-Heron

This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s the sleuth in the slough, the hunter on the hummock, the cracker of crabs, the Yellow-crowned Night-Heron (Nyctanassa violacea).

The Yellow-crowned Night-Heron is a wading bird of average height with a robust build and mostly monochrome plumage. On adult birds, orange-yellow legs hold up a solid basaltic-gray body buoying up black and gray streaked wings of granite. Atop a short neck sits a two-tone head, black across with triangles of white over the forehead, cheek, and chin all pointing to an ochre-orange eye at the base of a stout black dagger of a bill and, to cap it off for a touch of flare, two thin white plumes trail rearward from the back of the head. Juvenile birds instead are more muted and camouflaged, cloaking themselves in a dark walnut-brown split apart by streaks and shards of bone-white, eschewing elegance and fashion for raw practicality.

Juvenile birds of both our Night-Heron species look quite similar but the young’uns of Black-crowned Night-Herons (Nycticorax nycticorax) can be told apart by their paler plumage, shorter and thicker neck, and more yellow eyes. The simple squawking calls of each species are also similar but differ in tone. Yellow-Crowned Night-Herons having a deeper, more gravelly call that trails downward. Black-crowned Night-Herons have a much clearer and more resonant call, like the ‘caw’ of a crow.

The Yellow-crowned Night-Heron spends its summers, and occasionally a winter, here in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Despite the name, they forage here both under the light of our days and the moon’s pale rays. They are much less abundant than their Black-crowned cousins and mainly found here along the coast, where they forage in the shallow swamps, sloughs, and blackwater floodplains of the mainland and the marshes, mudflats, and tidal lagoons of the Sea Islands. They are specialists who hunt mainly crustaceans by actively patrolling shallows and mud for crayfish and small crabs to snap up and scarf down. During the heat of the day, Yellow-crowned Night-Herons can often be found roosting communally with other Night-Herons in thickets of shady oaks and shrubs overhanging water, biding their time for darker skies and favorable tides.

Tom Austin