Black-crowned Night-Heron

Black-crowned Night Heron in Hawaii. John Madsen photo

When we arrived at our hotel in Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii a few years ago, we were startled to see someone we recognized from Saskatchewan - a Black-crowned Night-Heron basking on a rock in the lobby pool. Prior to this, the last night-heron I had seen was the previous summer, slowly beating its way just above the water, following the creek on the ninth hole of Naicam Golf Course.

At first we didn't notice that the bird only had one foot. According to a hotel worker, its foot was probably snapped off by a fish. And this wasn't a winter visitor like us. It lives there year round and is called Aukuu in Hawaiian.

Black-crowned Night-Herons are the most widespread herons in the world found on all the continents except Antarctica. They are about the same size as crows and their bill is much shorter than that of a Great-Blue Heron. They don't stab their prey; they catch it. They also nest in colonies, in trees, bushes or cattails.

The first colony of Night-Herons John and I saw was at the Pamela Wallin Wetlands, just south and west of Wadena. It was surprising to see so many slump shouldered birds in the trees but they were also on the ground by the edge of the creek and seemed to be catching something to eat - maybe frogs? Apparently they prefer to hunt at dusk or at night - hence their name - and this adaptation allows them to share the same foraging territory as Great-Blue Herons, for example, which hunt during the day. It was afternoon when we saw them, so does this mean that they are night-hunters only if there are other herons around?

Female Night-Herons must be blessed with a surfeit of maternal instinct because they don't mind looking after someone else's babies, too. Or is it the opposite - so little maternal instinct that they cannot tell strange babies from their own? It's a mystery.

The one-footed night-heron in the photo did, in a sense, solve an old mystery for me. Some 60 or so years ago, when my siblings and I were trudging 2+ miles home from the one-room country school house we attended, we came upon a meadowlark hanging upside down with one foot impaled on a barb on the fence. We thought it was dead but, when we got close, it struggled mightily to free itself. We could see the foot was nearly severed from the leg. While one cupped the bird to keep it from causing further damage, another tried to free the foot but it was fused to the barb and could not be budged.

That's when a pair of blunt-nosed scissors came out of a pencil case, and with one snip, the foot was severed and the bird was set free. Immediately it flew some distance out into the field and disappeared from view. But could a bird survive with only one foot? The night-heron in Hawaii answered that.