Chad's Bird Blog: 6/14/13 Happy Place in the Evening

Carolyn and I have found that if we go to the Happy Place at night, like around 6:00, it's a little less muggy. The lighting is also pretty nice. For this post, I decided not to crop or edit any of the pictures in any way...

This Black-crowned Night Heron nest is actually best observed from shore. It is the only one in this part of the pond and one of maybe 5-8 Black-crowned nests among the literally hundreds of Cattle Egret and dozens of Little Blues.

The point of this picture is just to show how densely populated the Cattle Egret and Little Blue Heron nests are.

Black-crowned Night Heron (the same one as above)

Black-crowned Night Heron - getting closer...

Black-crowned Night Heron (and closer.)

Again, notice how many nesting birds there are - and look at these baby Little Blue Herons.

Little Blue Heron

Black-crowned Night Heron

Black-crowned Night Heron - we're getting too close for comfort now.

Black-crowned Night Heron

Little Blue Heron

For some reason, I think the Cattle Egret babies are uglier than the others.

More Cattle Egret babies.

Cattle Egrets

Little Blue Heron. I really like the protective pose this bird took over the nest.

This is another Black-crowned Night Heron nest in a different part of the same pond.

Black-crowned Night Heron

There are one, maybe two Tricolored Heron nests in the same area of the pond as the Black-crowned above. We also saw a lot of Great Egrets in the same area, but we haven't found where they're nesting for sure. Anyway, this was just before sunset and I got a bunch of good pictures of this Tricolored Heron. I probably kept too many of them, but I couldn't decide which ones to delete.

Tricolored Heron

Cattle Egret babies

I call these next three pictures Cormorant synchronized swimming. I'm not sure, but I think these are Double-crested Cormorants. The other option would be Neotropic Cormorants - we have both around here.