{"id":160673,"date":"2024-06-23T04:15:04","date_gmt":"2024-06-23T10:15:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=160673"},"modified":"2024-06-23T04:15:04","modified_gmt":"2024-06-23T10:15:04","slug":"black-crowned-night-heron-a-mystery-diet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2024\/06\/23\/black-crowned-night-heron-a-mystery-diet\/","title":{"rendered":"Black-crowned Night Heron – A Mystery Diet"},"content":{"rendered":"

I like to know what the birds I’m photographing are eating. Sometimes I can ID it and sometimes I can’t.<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

On my last trip to Bear River MBR I had quite a few good opportunities with adult Black-crowned Night Herons while they were hunting and feeding. It’s funny, some trips up there provide me photos of only adults and other trips I photograph only juveniles. For me there’s rarely been a mix this year.<\/p>\n

This guy was slow-motion hunting. As he was sneaking up on prey he’d spotted he was moving so slowly I could barely tell he was moving at all. I like this hunting pose with his intense concentration and his duckweed-covered raised foot.<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

When he eventually (it took a very long time) got close to whatever it was, he really<\/span> stretched his neck out. In this pose, which he held for quite a while, his head and neck are actually longer than the rest of his body.<\/p>\n

I was curious to know how much longer so I used Photoshop to put a grid on the photo and measure both in grid squares. His head and neck are 21 grid squares long and the rest of his body is 18 grid squares long. That’s a lot of neck, especially since they usually look much more compact than this.<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

When he finally struck, he caught the prey but it was wrapped in a big gob of duckweed and stringy aquatic vegetation. It seemed like it took him forever to extract the prey item from the green slimy mess. I actually took 135 photos documenting the process but eventually…<\/p>\n

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1\/4000, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

he had it cleaned up enough to swallow, even though there was still some ‘salad’ bits stuck to it.<\/p>\n

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I wanted to know what the prey was badly enough to look very closely at each of those 135 photos, many of them blown up to 100% and that took some time. But I just can’t tell, not for sure.<\/p>\n

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1\/6400, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

Later that morning I photographed this adult eating something… similar?<\/p>\n

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In some ways it looks like a dark crayfish but in other ways it doesn’t, so I still don’t know what the herons were eating that day. However, I was pleased with the unusually good look at this bird’s nictitating membrane in mid-blink.<\/p>\n

Black-crowned Night Herons will eat about anything. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a longer and more varied grouping of food items listed by Cornell’s Birds of the World for any other species of bird.<\/p>\n

“Opportunistic forager, taking a wide variety of foods including leeches, earthworms, aquatic and terrestrial insects, prawns and crayfish, clams, mussels, squid, freshwater and marine fish, amphibians, lizards, snakes, turtles, small mammals, birds, eggs, carrion, plant materials, and garbage\/refuse from landfills.”<\/em><\/p>\n

The original foodie.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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I like to know what the birds I’m photographing are eating. Sometimes I can ID it and sometimes I can’t.\u00a0(7 photos)<\/p>\n

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