Backyard and Beyond

Black-crowned Night-heron stalking the shallows at low tide.A slow, patient hunter, but given to snapping the neck rather suddenly, making that breeding plume corkscrew. Is this to throw water droplets off the bill?What’s for lunch? This bird is another all-purpose devourer. In this case — three separate cases while I watched — it was worms for lunch.Marine worms, Polychaeta (I guess).Nycticorax nycticorax, the redundant “night raven.” Choate in the Dictionary of American Bird Names says Linnaeus thought the bird’s “kwok” call was corvid-like. Did he actually hear one? They’re cosmopolitan around the tropical zone and get well into the northern temperate, but not up into Sweden as far as I can tell.