Last Sunday, as I watched the Night Herons at the Ocean City Welcome Center, I kept hearing loud noises as if someone was breaking branches. It turned out that it was the herons themselves. As you can see from the photo below, these herons have very sturdy, thick bills.
Yellow-crowned Night Heron.
In fact, they are known as crab eaters, eating whole crabs by crushing them with their bills before swallowing them. With larger crabs, they grab them with their bill and then shake them violently to break them up into smaller pieces. Their bills are like those steel crab crackers that they have at restaurants that serve crabs.
A the start of breeding season, the herons have to build nests where the females will lay their eggs. They go around their neighborhood and use their bills to break dead branches and bring the pieces back to their nests.
Yellow-crowned Night Heron: “We need more branches.”
Heron seized branch with bill.
Heron jumping up and down to break branch.
Got one!
Back to nest with broken branch.
Depositing branch at nest.
neihtn 
Great action shots!
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Beautiful shots of the building process!
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Wow some very strong birds! Great images of these workers.
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Sue, I kept thinking that some human was making all that noise! Ha, ha, now we know.
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Such industrious birds and beautiful too 😊.
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Indeed. I can hardly wait to go back there in a couple weeks to see if they have eggs in their nests, or maybe even newly hatched babies.
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I hope you will let us know 😊.
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Having never seen this myself, I assumed that herons simply picked up dead branches. Thanks for the great photos and a natural history lesson!
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They may also pick up dead branches, but there never are enough, so they have to resort to breaking, or to stealing from other nests if no heron was looking.
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Some remarkable action shots here! 🙂
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Thanks, Amy.
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