Adult Bare-throated Tiger-Heron, photo by Rick Snider. This is the first United States record. The multisyllabically monikered, heavily hyphenated heron ranges from northern Mexico all the way south through Central America and into northern South America.
Rick Nirschl's shot of the bird flying away. Let's hope, for the sake of all the rabid listers, not for good. Last I heard, no one had relocated it..jpg)
Here's an immature Bare-throated Tiger-Heron that I took in Costa Rica earlier this year. They are very cool birds, and it's hard to imagine what a thrill stumbling into one in Texas, north of the border, must have been.Not only are they striped in a manner somewhat reminiscent of a tiger, they make sounds that might make one think a tiger was on the prowl. They'll sit in trees, and deliver spooky-sounding low guttural roars that would certainly give pause to someone that didn't know what they were hearing.
Major congratulations are in order to Rick and Rick. Mr. Nirschl, who is past president of the Toledo Naturalists' Association and makes his home in Toledo when not in south Texas, is one of the finest field naturalists that I've met. This is the guy who found Ohio's first state record of Striped Saddlebags, Tramia calverti (dragonfly), among many other wonderful discoveries. This tiger-heron will be hard to top though, even for Rick!
2 comments:
Very informative. That's a beautiful bird and congratulations to the guys who found it in Texas.
I just happened to be passing through on the Internet on Christmas eve, so Merry Christmas!
I've birded with Rick since 1985. I'm not the least surprised that his keen observational skills have, yet again, recorded something to delight his fellow nature lovers.
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