Birds of Central Oklahoma

All birds Herons, Egrets, and Bitterns

Little Blue Heron, adult
Adult Photo by Dori. CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Little Blue Heron

Egretta caerulea

Here April to September.

Recorded by Paul Driver. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, via xeno-canto, trimmed and volume evened out.

Look for

  1. Grown-ups are dark blue-gray all over. The head and neck look a little purple.
  2. A blue bill with a black tip.
  3. Young ones are white all over at first, with dull green legs.

A little about it

Little Blue Herons spend the summer here. Look for them from April to September. In fall they head south, and some fly all the way to South America.

This heron is a slow, careful hunter. It walks very slowly through shallow water, or it stands still and waits for food to come close. It eats mostly small fish and crayfish, and in fields it catches lots of grasshoppers.

Little Blue Herons nest in groups. Both parents build a nest of sticks in a tree or bush, usually 3 to 15 feet up. When the chicks are 2 or 3 weeks old, they start climbing out onto the branches nearby.

In the late 1800s, hunters killed huge numbers of white egrets for their long, fancy feathers. Little Blue Herons have dark feathers and no long plumes, so the hunters mostly left them alone.

Fun fact

Young Little Blue Herons start out white. As their blue feathers grow in, they look patchy blue and white for a while. People call this the "calico" look, like a calico cat.

When it's here

Taller bars mean more sightings. Most often seen in August.

More summer birds

How big

SparrowRobinCrowGoose

22 to 29 inches, with wings a little over 3 feet across. Bigger than a crow, but much smaller than a Great Blue Heron.

Where to look

Marshes and the shallow edges of ponds and lakes. Sometimes it hunts in wet meadows and grassy fields too.

  • On or by water
  • Fields and roadsides

People have spotted it at Arcadia Lake, Lake Overholser, Lake Hefner.

Could it be something else?

  • Snowy Egret

    A young Little Blue Heron is white too. A grown-up Snowy Egret has bright yellow feet and yellow skin in front of each eye. A young Little Blue usually has gray skin there and dull green legs, and it hunts more slowly.

  • Great Blue Heron

    Also gray-blue, but much bigger, with a huge bill. Its head is whitish, with a black stripe above each eye.

More photos

Little Blue Heron, young bird
Young bird Photo by Laura Clark. CC BY, via iNaturalist.

Where these facts come from