All species › Pelicans, herons and ibises › Herons and bitterns › Grey Heron
Grey Heron
Ardea cinerea | Blauwe Reiger | Garza real
The Grey Heron stands beside every ditch and city pond, which is exactly why it is so rarely looked at properly. Take the time and you see a predator with a startling strike and a surprisingly delicate breeding plumage.
Voice
A harsh, grating fraank given in flight, often at dusk over towns, and heard right through the year. At the colony from February to May there is a racket of guttural croaks, bill-clattering and the hoarse squealing of begging young.
Recording: Benoît Van Hecke — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Identification
Large and grey with a white head and neck, a black supercilium running into a drooping crest, a black shoulder patch and a dagger-like yellow bill that briefly flushes orange-pink in courtship. In flight the neck is folded into an S, the legs trail, and the beats are slow and deep on bowed wings. Juveniles are duller, with a grey crown and no plumes.
Confusion species
Purple Heron is smaller and darker, with a rufous neck striped black, a thin snaky neck that sags more deeply in flight, and huge toes; it stays in reedbeds. Great White Egret is entirely white. Storks and cranes fly with the neck outstretched, something a heron never does.
Habitat
Any waterside: polder ditches, canals, reed fringes, park ponds and shallow tidal creeks. Also hunts voles well away from water in grassland and stubble, and in towns will boldly work fish stalls, garden ponds and aviaries.
Range and movements
Widespread throughout Europe. In the Netherlands abundant year-round and famously tame, with heronries in parks and small woods. In Spain it breeds mainly in Doñana, the Ebro Delta and along the big rivers, with northern birds arriving in winter to escape frost.
- Resident
- Breeding (summer)
- Winter
- Passage
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
Where and when to look
Visit a heronry in February or March, when the trees are still bare and nests and displaying pairs are in plain view. On frosty winter mornings herons hunch beside the last open water and on molehills, and are then easiest to approach.
Conservation status
Increased strongly during the twentieth century thanks to protection and cleaner water, and now broadly stable. Severe winters with prolonged ice still cause heavy mortality, and locally the disturbance of colonies and the loss of gently sloping, vegetated banks matter.