Photo Study Of A Juvenile Yellow-crowned Night-Heron At E.B. Forsythe NWR (Brigantine), September 16th, 2010

    We went to Brig today hoping to see lots of shorebirds. There were hundreds of Great and Snowy Egrets; hundreds of Double-crested Cormorants; several Great Blue Herons;
    lots of Forster's Terns and Laughing Gulls. However, we only saw three Semipalmated Sandpipers; two Semipalmated Plovers and two Black-bellied Plovers. No Skimmers;
    no Dowitchers; no Avocets; no Buff-breasted Sandpipers and no Godwits. There were none of the shorebirds reported seen at Brig every day for the past few weeks.
    We struck out!  Alas, apparently all of the shorebirds had moved on! But all was not lost!

    We found a beautiful juvenile Yellow-crowned Night-Heron on the salt side of the East Dike who took great pity on us and posed for almost twenty minutes.

  
                                                                                                             Juvenile Yellow-crowned Night-Heron                                                                                                                                       

 And for comparative purposes here is a photo of a Juvenile Yellow-crowned Night-Heron taken today and a photo of a Black-crowned Night-Heron taken at Brig on August 8th:

Juvenile Yellow-crowned Night-Heron                                                                                Juvenile Black-crowned Night-Heron

    The Yellow-crowned Night-Heron (Nyctanassa violacea) is a nocturnal heron of southern swamps and coasts. It is about twenty-one inches in length and has a wingspan
    of forty-four inches. It can also be found breeding along wooded streams northward to Indiana and Illinois. Unfortunately, it has been listed as a threatened species in
    New Jersey since 1984, primarily due to the loss of suitable breeding habitat.

    The Yellow-crowned Night Heron forages for food both during the day and at night. Most of the Yellow-crowned Night-Heron's diet is made up of crustaceans like crabs
    and crayfish. It sometimes eats fish, eels, mussels, frogs, tadpoles, aquatic insects, snails, and small snakes. It either stands and waits for its prey to swim by or wades in
    shallow water and slowly stalks its prey. (Audubon; Cornell BNA)

To see a larger image of any of the photos below, please click on either the thumbnails or the captions...thanks!

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