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Black-crowned Night Heron | Nycticorax nycticorax
Kwak | Martinete común
The Black-crowned Night Heron is a stocky night heron with short legs and a thick neck, which usually roosts hidden in dense trees by day and flies out at dusk to feed. It is one of the most widespread herons in the world. In the Caribbean it is locally common on the larger islands, the ABC islands and Trinidad, but on most smaller islands far scarcer than Yellow-crowned Night Heron.
Voice
A low, hollow, croaking kwok or wok, especially at dusk and in flight at night; at the colony a variety of croaking and clucking sounds.
Recording: Timeo CONSTANT — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
58–66 cm, stocky, with a short, thick bill and short yellow legs. Adults have a black crown and mantle, pale grey wings and tail, and white to pale grey cheeks and underparts. Two to four long white plumes hang from the hindhead. The eye is red; in the breeding season the legs turn pink to reddish. Juveniles are grey-brown with large, teardrop-shaped white spots on the wings and pale, brown-streaked underparts; they have an orange eye and a yellowish bill base. Adult plumage is reached after several years. In flight a compact shape with blunt wings; the legs barely project beyond the tail. The sexes are alike.
Confusion species
Young Yellow-crowned Night Herons Nyctanassa violacea are greyer, with finer white spots, a thicker, all-dark bill and longer legs that clearly project beyond the tail in flight. Adult Yellow-crowned are uniform blue-grey with a black-and-white head. American Bittern Botaurus lentiginosus is warmer brown, with dark streaks down the neck and no white wing spots.
Habitat
Freshwater marshes, ponds, rivers, rice fields and fish ponds, but also mangroves and coastal lagoons. It eats fish, frogs, crustaceans, insects and at times the young of other birds, mainly from the shore at dusk and at night. It nests in colonies, often with other herons, in mangroves, swamp forest or trees near water.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation types of the Caribbean.
Range and movements
Resident on Cuba, Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, the ABC islands and Trinidad and Tobago, locally common but closely tied to suitable water. Scarcer in the Virgin Islands and the Lesser Antilles; fairly regular on, among others, Guadeloupe, Antigua, Barbados, Sint Maarten and Grenada, an irregular visitor to most other islands. Scarce on San Andrés and in the Turks and Caicos Islands. Birds from North America arrive in winter. Outside the region across much of the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia.
- Resident
- Summer visitor (c. Oct–Mar)
- Winter visitor (c. Apr–Sep)
- Passage (Mar–Apr, Oct–Nov)
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
At dusk near ponds, river backwaters and mangroves, when the birds leave their roost. By day, roosting groups sit in dense trees over water, often in or near heron colonies, where careful searching among the leaves can reveal them.
Conservation status
Not threatened. Colonies are sensitive to disturbance, and habitat is lost locally through the draining of wetlands and mangrove clearance.
Scientific name
Nycticorax nycticorax | (Linnaeus, 1758)
Linnaeus described the species in 1758 as Ardea Nycticorax; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Nycticorax was introduced in 1817 by Forster. Nycticorax is Greek, from nux, genitive nuktos, 'night' and korax 'raven': night raven. In Aristotle and Hesychius it is a bird of ill omen, perhaps an owl; Conrad Gessner used the word for this heron in 1555. The specific epithet repeats the genus name. The specimen the first description was based on came from southern Europe.