Right bird, wrong name...

[khiemtran]

So, I recently discovered that the bird I had been identifying as a nankeen night heron was actually a striated heron. We saw one on the weekend at Mullet Creek, and then just today there was another one at the creek by my office. These shy birds are furtiveness personified...



But the most remarkable thing about them is the way they can transform their bodies into different shapes. It's difficult to believe it's the same bird sometimes. These shots were all taken within seconds of each other. First, the heron is in stalking mode...



When alarmed, it turns into an angry penguin.



And then out comes that astonishing neck...

Comments

[mnfaure.livejournal.com]

How did you figure out it was the striated heron?

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

One thing that was bugging me was that if these were night herons then they all didn't have the full adult colouring, and as we saw more and more it became obvious that they couldn't all be juveniles. Then, when we were on our summer holidays, I took a photo of what looked like a real adult nankeen night heron and it looked quite different (some of the earlier pictures that matched the birds we see hear were from the internet and probably mislabelled like mine). Finally, I did a wider search and found that the adult striated heron was a far more likely match. For some reason, it didn't show up in the lists of common birds that the nankeen night heron is in, but they certainly seem more common around here.

[puddleshark.livejournal.com]

Those are some amazing pictures. I wish I could get that close to my egrets.

What an extraordinary neck - hard to believe it's the same bird in pictures one and four!

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's a real mystery how it carries it around. I can only guess it's folded up under its feathers, or maybe the skin around its neck is loose enough that you can't see the neck is bent.

[julesjones]

Giggling at the angry penguin, because yes, that is exactly what it looks like in that photo. :-)

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

It does, doesn't it? I think this is actually its alert position, where it's holding its head up high to look around. It's not so obvious in the photo because I'm looking down at it from a small bridge over the creek.

I need a transformer icon...

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

It's a transformer bird--more than meets the eye.

I was also interested in your experience figuring out what type of heron it actually was (what you wrote to mnfaure up above. I've had that happen too (not with herons, but with plants, which you'd think it would be harder to make mistakes about).

Re: I need a transformer icon...

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Yes, I just hope other people don't find my mislabelled photos now and use them to make the same mistake.