Valley Nature: On the prowl

A heron? You've got to be kidding. This bird is much too diminutive to be a heron.

But a heron the least bittern is.

About the size of a crow, there are benefits to being a pint-sized member of the heron family.

For one thing, it's difficult for predators to spot because of the small size and brown and dark plumage and streaking on the front portion of the neck.

Secondly, the least bittern can hunt where other herons and egrets can't, and that includes standing on a reed.

Often, you will hear a least bittern before seeing one. A soft coo, coo, coo call in a marsh means there's one or more least bitterns around. Be patient and quiet and you might actually see one.

They come to edges of marshes lined with vegetation and when they spot a small fish or insect, they freeze. The neck extends to the point that you think the bird is going to tip over. Then, with lightning precision, it spears the prey, often moving to underbrush to devour it.

Perhaps the one characteristic that sets the least bittern apart from other water birds is its uncanny ability to walk on reeds, often straddling two reeds above the water.

When alarmed, it will often freeze and, just like the much larger American bittern, try to make you think its neck is part of the reeds, to the point it will even sway in the breeze.

Nests are a platform built of marsh debris with a canopy of plants bent over the top, according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Clutches are two to seven pale green or blue eggs. Hatchlings are well hidden and difficult to find.

The Rio Grande Valley is right at the northern edge of their year-round range, but many that you see here are probably on their way from wintering grounds in Mexico, Central America and South America to breeding grounds east of the Mississippi River, though there are populations as far west as Mexico.

According to Cornell, there's not a lot of data on population fluctuations, but loss of wetlands is a definite threat.