How to Identify Wading Birds by Sight

Video Transcript

"Hello. Welcome to Expert Village. My name is Wayne Petersen and I'm the director of the Important Bird Areas Program for the Massachusetts Audubon Society. Today, we're here at the Daniel Webster Wildlife Sanctuary in Marshfield, Massachusetts, where we'll be talking about bird identification and some of the equipment and essential tools that are useful to get one started in this incredibly interesting pastime. In wetland situations, one of the more frequently encountered birds are the long legged wading birds. These will be things like herons, egrets, and ibises. These are all birds that are very distinctive and typically quite large. Many of them stand, you know, as much as two feet or more in length, and typically have in addition to long slender legs, long necks. In some cases, their bills are very straight, such as in the Great Blue Heron and the Great Egret. And in other cases, like the Glossy Ibis, the bill is strongly decurved, almost sickle shaped in configuration. Some of the long legged wading birds are prominently white, such as the Great Egret and the Snowy Egret. In which case we look for things like the color of the bill, yellow in the Great Egret, black in the Snowy Egret. Or the coloration of the legs, black with yellow feet in the Snowy Egret, and completely dark in the Great Egret. For birds like the Great Blue Heron, one of our commonest large long legged wading birds, the overall sort of slatey blue color and gentle streaks on the neck are very distinctive. Some of the other long legged wading birds that are less conspicuous would be the American Bittern and the Least Bittern. These are birds that typically occur in cattail marshes like the one behind me here and are often are very reclusive and hard to see and use the streaks on their body plumage to lend them inconspicuous when they're standing amongst the cattails."