All species › Pelicans, herons and ibises › Herons and bitterns › Eurasian Bittern
Eurasian Bittern | Botaurus stellaris
Roerdomp | Avetoro Común
The Eurasian Bittern is a large golden-brown heron of dense reedbeds that almost always stays hidden and is betrayed far more by its deep, booming call than by its appearance. The region holds its own, very small resident population, the subspecies capensis.
Voice
The male's display call is a deep, far-carrying boom, preceded by a few audible intakes of breath, uh-uh-uh-OOMP, repeated three to five times and audible for kilometres on still evenings, especially at dusk and at night in the summer months. In flight sometimes a hoarse kau.
Recording: Stanley Baldauf — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
64–80 cm, wingspan 1 to 1.3 metres. Stocky, with a thick neck and a short dagger bill. The plumage is golden-brown to ochre, densely speckled and streaked with blackish-brown, with a black crown, a dark moustachial stripe and broad brown streaks down the foreneck. The bill is yellowish-green, the legs green. The subspecies capensis is darker and warmer brown than European birds. In flight broad and owl-like, with rounded barred wings, retracted neck and green legs just projecting beyond the tail. When alarmed it adopts the sky-pointing posture: bill straight up, body slim, swaying with the reeds.
Confusion species
Juvenile Black-Crowned Night Herons Nycticorax nycticorax are smaller, grey-brown with white droplet spots on the upperparts and red to orange eyes. Juvenile Purple Herons Ardea purpurea are slimmer, long-necked and rusty brown without dense speckling. The Dwarf Bittern Botaurus sturmii and Little Bittern Botaurus minutus are much smaller.
Habitat
Extensive permanent reed, bulrush and sedge marshes with shallow water and open patches, in highveld and montane grassland and along floodplains. It creeps slowly along the edge of vegetation, taking fish, frogs, aquatic insects and small mammals. The nest is a platform of reeds hidden in dense growth above water.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of southern Africa.
Range and movements
Very local and thinly distributed: in South Africa in the vleis of the Mpumalanga highveld and the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, with old records from Gauteng, the Free State and the Eastern Cape; also Zimbabwe, the Okavango Delta in Botswana, the swamps of Zambia (Bangweulu, Kafue), Malawi and Lesotho (historically). Beyond the region the nominate form breeds across Europe and Asia, wintering in North Africa, the Sahel and southern Asia.
- Resident
- Summer visitor (c. Oct–Mar)
- Passage (Mar–Apr, Oct–Nov)
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Listen at dusk from October to January at the large highveld vleis, for example around Wakkerstroom and Chrissiesmeer in Mpumalanga. Seeing one is rare; the best chance is a bird flying briefly low over the reeds or standing at the edge of an open patch.
Conservation status
Not globally threatened, but the African subspecies probably numbers only a few hundred birds. In South Africa it is nationally Critically Endangered through the draining, grazing and burning of vleis and the loss of breeding habitat to farming and mining. Protection of large highveld marshes is the key to its survival.
Scientific name
Botaurus stellaris | (Linnaeus, 1758)
Linnaeus described the species in 1758 as Ardea stellaris; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Botaurus was introduced in 1819 by Stephens. Botaurus is Medieval Latin for a bittern; the word combines Latin bos 'ox' with taurus 'bull', after the booming call (compare butire 'to boom'). stellaris is Latin for 'starred', from stella 'star', referring to the speckled plumage. The specimen the first description was based on came from Sweden.