BLACK-CROWNED NIGHT HERON (Nycticorax nycticorax)
category: CONSERVATIONGENERALURBAN BIRD CALL
This “grumpy” Black-crowned Night Heron demonstrates its signature hunting pose, a motionless stance for ambushing fish in shallow waters. Photo: Ellen Michaels
This article appears in the spring 2025 issue of The Urban Bird Call.
Kellye Rosenheim | February 25, 2025
As a sometime leader of kids’ bird outings, I have a particular fondness for the Black-crowned Night Heron. Getting everyone’s eyes onto flitting songbirds can be a challenge, so I rejoice when I see a big, stocky, mostly white heron roosting on a branch near the water. Because we’re out in the daytime, this bird is not going to move. We all can admire its luminous white breast, slaty gray wing feathers, long head plumes in breeding season and (if the bird is awake) crimson red eye.
This is one of the most widespread herons in the world—and for now, one of the most abundant in New York Harbor. A chunky, short-legged, short-necked bird, with a large head, it’s the only heron in our area with a black cap and dark back, wings, rump, and tail. Both sexes look alike, and in the breeding season, both acquire plumes. Juveniles sport mottled brown and white plumage.
Though sometimes active during the day, the birds prefer to feed at night as their name implies. You’ll see them poised in a “grumpy old man” crouch near the edge of a weedy pond, waiting to pounce. These opportunistic feeders eat a variety of organisms, using a number of techniques; sometimes even tools (such as manipulating bread to attract fish).
Their call is distinctive, a slightly nasal squawk. Colloquially, people have called it the Qua bird, the Quock, and the Squawk. Ornithologist Edward Howe Forbush describes its call as “Ordinarily a hoarse, abrupt quock; when disturbed on its breeding grounds, a variety of harsh squawks and croaks; a loud wock-o-wock-wock.”
In years past, the New York City rookery, like many in our region, had thousands of nests. “NYC has been home to the largest population of Black-crowned Night Herons in the Northeast,” says Dr. Dustin Partridge, NYC Bird Alliance’s director of conservation and science. “These birds are quintessential New Yorkers.”
Now these once ubiquitous birds are facing steep population declines. Read more here about this alarming discovery and what is needed to help these herons survive in New York Harbor.
This article appears in the spring 2025 issue of The Urban Bird Call.
Kellye Rosenheim | February 25, 2025
As a sometime leader of kids’ bird outings, I have a particular fondness for the Black-crowned Night Heron. Getting everyone’s eyes onto flitting songbirds can be a challenge, so I rejoice when I see a big, stocky, mostly white heron roosting on a branch near the water. Because we’re out in the daytime, this bird is not going to move. We all can admire its luminous white breast, slaty gray wing feathers, long head plumes in breeding season and (if the bird is awake) crimson red eye.
This is one of the most widespread herons in the world—and for now, one of the most abundant in New York Harbor. A chunky, short-legged, short-necked bird, with a large head, it’s the only heron in our area with a black cap and dark back, wings, rump, and tail. Both sexes look alike, and in the breeding season, both acquire plumes. Juveniles sport mottled brown and white plumage.
Though sometimes active during the day, the birds prefer to feed at night as their name implies. You’ll see them poised in a “grumpy old man” crouch near the edge of a weedy pond, waiting to pounce. These opportunistic feeders eat a variety of organisms, using a number of techniques; sometimes even tools (such as manipulating bread to attract fish).
Their call is distinctive, a slightly nasal squawk. Colloquially, people have called it the Qua bird, the Quock, and the Squawk. Ornithologist Edward Howe Forbush describes its call as “Ordinarily a hoarse, abrupt quock; when disturbed on its breeding grounds, a variety of harsh squawks and croaks; a loud wock-o-wock-wock.”
In years past, the New York City rookery, like many in our region, had thousands of nests. “NYC has been home to the largest population of Black-crowned Night Herons in the Northeast,” says Dr. Dustin Partridge, NYC Bird Alliance’s director of conservation and science. “These birds are quintessential New Yorkers.”
Now these once ubiquitous birds are facing steep population declines. Read more here about this alarming discovery and what is needed to help these herons survive in New York Harbor.
