Black-crowned Night Herons in the Daytime!

Busy days! I've found precious little time to post pictures in the last few weeks with the start of school and a major field studies trip, but things are slowing down just a little bit, and I've had a few quiet moments. I just took a stroll around the CSU Stanislaus campus before a class this evening.

I saw a few first arrivals of the fall migrants, mainly White-crowned Sparrows and Yellow-rumped Warblers, but the attention-getter of the evening was the pair of Black-crowned Night Herons (Nycticorax nycticorax) hanging out on the bridge over Warrior Lake.

I see them often enough, but it is somewhat rare for them to be so available for photographs. I'm glad they were feeling visible today! They are beautiful birds.

The Gifts of the Day: Black-crowned Night-Herons at CSU Stanislaus

Some days are just gifts, and I can certainly say I've had more than my share. And this was one of those days for kind of a silly reason. I like to count things. It's just a quirk in my personality. I count the students in my classes. I count hits on blog meters. I count the days to pay day. I count all kinds of things. That's why birding was bound to eventually become an avocation (obsession?) for me, once I caught on.

So I record my bird sightings on eBird which has a whole bunch of neat ways to keep track of one's birding adventures. And one of those lists is the yearly tally, the birds one has seen since the first of the year (as opposed to the "life-list"). I've been dutifully keeping track of my bird sightings and the numbers mounted, with 98 birds sighted in the county since New Year's Day. And then I seemed to stall. There was the wonderful sight of the Bald Eagle two weeks ago, but there had been little movement since then. Lots of birds, but not new species. I was stalled at 98 and it bothered me in a "Monk" sort of way. I wanted to get to a nice even 100 and it just wasn't happening.

So I headed over to CSU Stanislaus for my evening course, and I decided to walk a little and see if I could find the rare Sage Thrasher that has been living on the campus the last few months. I found it and got a couple of pictures, but it wasn't bird 99 (I had seen it last month). But then another bird hopped into view and I recognized a Hermit Thrush! It was pretty, and it was bird 99. Now I was on a roll and I decided to search for the Black-crowned Night-Heron (Nycticorax nycticorax) that I knew was living in the reeds of Willow Lake. I couldn't find it but I decided to have a look at Warrior Lake too and there it was! A Black-crowned Night-Heron! And it was staying still. I got a bunch of close-ups from my spot on the bridge.

I was thrilled, but eventually I had to move on. And then from the other side of the bridge, I spotted another! This time it was a juvenile. And it cooperated for pictures too. So in the end, I got to see two of my favorite birds, but I also reached a nice arbitrary number as well, 100 birds so far this year in Stanislaus County.

Black-crowned Night-Heron at CSU Stanislaus

It's was time for final exams at CSU last week, but I arrived early enough to stroll around the campus to see what birds were out and about. Stanislaus is not a bad spot for seeing birds. There are lots of trees and ponds for habitat, so I tend to see a fair variety as I walk about.

Most of the ponds are carefully tended and the reeds are cut back to keep things "manicured", but Willow Lake lies between the two science complexes and adjacent to the outdoor laboratory area, so it is more overgrown and wild than the other water bodies (I'm pretty sure that's on purpose). It usually has the best variety of water birds and shore birds. There are always some Mallards around, a few American Coots, and some loud and obnoxious Canada Geese. In spring and summer there are Great-tailed Grackles to add to the cacophony. A Snowy Egret usually fishes quietly along the shore.

But until that night of finals, I had never seen an adult Black-crowned Night-Heron (Nycticorax nycticorax). I've seen the Hawaiian sub-species, and I saw a juvenile once in 2016, but never a grown individual. It was in the weeds at the south end of the pond.

It seemed unconcerned about my presence (I was on the walkway along with dozens of other people). The pictures seem close, but that was the zoom-lens at work. The Night-Herons are common enough but are rarely seen because they usually forage at, well, night. They lay low during the daytime hours. Luckily I was out at sunset.

'Auku'u, the Black-crowned Night Heron in Hilo

What happens when you take a flash picture of a bird standing on black basalt surrounded by black water at night? This. It's one of the native birds of Hawai'i, a Black-crowned Night-Heron (Nycticorax nycticorax hoactli). The bird is pretty much the same as the night herons found across the Americas, but it does stand out on the Hawaiian Islands as one of the few native species that can be sighted in the urban areas of the state. They are doing okay as a species, but there are only a few hundred of them, so their future is not assured.