Dan Logen reports seeing a Green Heron with a small bird in its beak and asks if anyone knows about other avian prey for this species. I've checked my Bent (Life Histories of North American Marsh Birds, 1926), which is a reliable old source of information that often doesn't find its way into modern books. I find nothing like this for the Green Heron. Checking information on its relatives, I find Bent commenting, "The American bittern enjoys a varied diet and a large appetite, but it is no vegetarian; it will feed freely, even gluttonously, on almost any kind of animal that it can find in the marshes and meadows that it frequents or about the edges of shallow, muddy ponds." I think this is generally true of all the herons, great and small; certainly many observers have reported Great Blue Herons snatching small birds, and Bent has one report of a partly fledged young Black-crowned Night Heron that swallowed a downy nestling (presumably of the same species) that had been placed in a cage with it. Birds that snatch amphibians, reptiles, crustaceans, and insects of all kinds are not likely to pass up a small bird if one comes into snatching range.

Burt Guttman
The Evergreen State College
Olympia, WA 98505 guttmanb at evergreen.edu
Home: 7334 Holmes Island Road S. E., Olympia, 98503