Fun Facts about Green Herons

• From a distance, the Green Heron is a dark, stocky bird hunched on slender yellow legs at the water’s edge, often hidden behind a tangle of leaves. Seen up close, it is a striking bird with a velvet-green back, rich chestnut body, and a dark cap often raised into a short crest. These small herons crouch patiently to surprise fish with a snatch of their daggerlike bill. They sometimes lure in fish using small items such as twigs or insects as bait
• Green Herons are common and widespread, but they can be hard to see at first. Whereas larger herons tend to stand prominently in open parts of wetlands, Green Herons tend to be at the edges, in shallow water, or concealed in vegetation. Visit a wetland and carefully scan the banks looking for a small, hunch-backed bird with a long, straight bill staring intently at the water. Their harsh skeow call is also a good clue. Green Herons are also distinctive in flight, with slow beats of their rounded wings making them look a bit like a tailless crow. Their habit of often briefly unfolding their neck during flight helps make them recognizable, too.
• Green Herons are common breeders in coastal and inland wetlands. They nest along swamps, marshes, lakes, ponds, impoundments, and other wet habitats with trees and shrubs to provide secluded nest sites. They may even nest in dry woods and orchards as long as there is water nearby for foraging. Green Herons spend the winter in southern coastal areas of their range, and in marine and freshwater habitat throughout Mexico and Central America. In tropical areas they are common in mangrove swamps.
• Green Herons eat mainly small fish such as minnows, sunfish, catfish, pickerel, carp, perch, gobies, shad, silverside, eels, and goldfish. They also feeds on insects, spiders, crustaceans, snails, amphibians, reptiles, and rodents. They hunt by standing still at the water’s edge, in vegetation, or by walking slowly in shallow water. When a fish approaches, the heron lunges and darts its head, grasping (or sometimes spearing) the fish with its heavy bill
• Green Herons sometimes pay visits to ornamental fish ponds. A length of drain pipe placed in the pond can provide fish with a place to hide from feeding herons.
• The oldest Green Heron on record was at least 8 years, 11 months old when it was found in Texas in 2021. It was banded there in 2013.