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Yellow-crowned night heron
Nyctanassa violacea
17.5041, -62.9785
Field Notes
Description:
While not as slender as a typical heron, the Yellow-crowned Night-Heron’s smooth purple-gray colors, sharp black-and-white face, and long yellow plumes lend it a touch of elegance.
Yellow-crowned Night-Herons are fairly small herons with stocky bodies and short, thick necks, and short legs. They have large, blocky heads with thick, relatively short bills. In flight, the wings are broad and rounded.
Habitat:
Near wateredge, at Zeelandia beach, on the East coast of Sint Eustatius, Caribbean
Notes:
Yellow-crowned Night-Herons forage both during the day and at night—in coastal areas the tide can trump the time of day: most foraging occurs from 3 hours before high tide to 3 hours after.
Along the Atlantic Coast, the timing of their breeding season depends on when crabs emerge in the spring, which itself depends on local temperatures.
Found year-round along the crustacean-rich southern Atlantic coast, Yellow-crowned Night-Herons in North America can also breed inland by feeding on crayfish in streams. They may breed as far north as Michigan and Ontario, and individuals can appear even farther north and west in spring (mainly adults) and late summer or early fall (juveniles).
This species shows up several times in the fossil record, and the earliest recorded fossil is 2–2.5 million years old (from Sarasota, Florida).
The oldest Yellow-crowned Night-Heron on record, banded in Mexico in 1974, was at least 6 years, 3 months old.
To build their nests, Yellow-crowned Night-Herons usually break dead, brittle twigs and branches directly from standing vegetation. In some colonies, they may completely strip trees of their twigs. They also sometimes steal twigs from other nests.
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