Talk:Great blue heron

30 blue herons

i live in greensburg indiana, and i have 30 if not moe great blue herons that just showed up out by my pond one day. I have never seen this many together could someone please explain these great birds to me?? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Crazy67 (talk • contribs) 02:18, 2 March 2007 (UTC).

I had seen great blues before but recently saw one with a major grey hairy-looking beard. I had difficulty with identification because no bearded ones are in the illustrations. Please add a bearded great blue to illustrations. Also why are some bearded and some not? Text suggest additional feathers during breeding season but does not address the beard. Thanks 12.185.136.253 (talk) 23:48, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

Blue Heron-Niagara Region

I live in Beamsville Ontario, there is a small creek at the back of our yard. We have a resident Blue Heron who shows up most days even now in winter time. This Heron is always alone so don't know if he or she has a mate somewhere around. Can anyone advise how to tell difference between male/female Blue Herons,are they usually in pairs or is this the case only during the mating season. Any info appreciated; John24.36.197.170 (talk) 20:13, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

This page is for discussing improvements to the article. For questions about the topic, please try the Wikipedia:Reference desk. Thank you. Walter Siegmund (talk) 01:29, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

Im in London Ont, we are close to a creek (stoney creek) that a blue heron frequently visits (mostly dusk/dawn). sorry to say, i cant tell the sex either. The one we see is ALWAYS alone.`. im not even sure when mating season is. Ive never seen them in pairs ever. There is quite a few in st marys also.. good luck — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.250.26.211 (talk) 13:01, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Mapcolours

I think the colours in the map are wrong. Yellow is breeding, green the year round and blue only winter.--88.5.134.155 (talk) 22:22, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

OK. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.151.143.228 (talk) 21:23, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Requested moves

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: moved. It looks like they've all been moved. ~~~~

---

• Great Blue Heron → Great blue heron
• Black-headed Heron → Black-headed heron
• Chinese Egret → Chinese egret
• Chinese Pond Heron → Chinese pond heron
• Goliath Heron → Goliath heron
• Great Egret → Great egret
• Green Heron → Green heron
• Green-backed Heron → Green-backed heron
• Grey Heron → Grey heron
• Indian Pond Heron → Indian pond heron
• Malayan Night Heron → Malayan night heron
• Black-crowned Night Heron → Black-crowned night heron
• Purple Heron → Purple heron
• Striated Heron → Striated heron
• Whistling Heron → Whistling heron

– Requested move as the consensus and guidelines recommend not to capitalise the common (vernacular) names of species. See Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Bird common name decapitalisation and Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Animals, plants, and other organisms. Regards, Sun Creator^(talk) 15:45, 4 May 2014 (UTC)

• Strongly support a fast move. The consensus and guidelines are clear (Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Bird common name decapitalisation and Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Animals, plants, and other organisms). Coreyemotela (talk) 18:59, 4 May 2014 (UTC).
• Support, finally. If this is proceeding according to some category-walking patterns, be it taxonomic or geographical, that seems like a good idea. Anyone who's taking on the downcasing in the actual article text, please see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds#The conversion is challenging; there are devils in the details. There's talk elsewhere of using bots or AWB scripts to move a lot of these articles and decapitalize within them, but I suspect this will be difficult to sort out, and the work might as well get started manually while that is worked up. A deeper question is how many of these are at IOC names that are not actually the WP:COMMONNAMEs, and thus need a different kind of move, for article titling policy reasons (many IOC names are made up by IOC and are unattested outside their own materials. Sometimes the scientific name is most common, in other cases other English-language or assimilated non-English names are common and the IOC ones are neologisms. In most cases the IOC names are fine.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  19:51, 4 May 2014 (UTC)
• I went ahead and moved a few of these. I don't think you need to file RMs; feel free to go ahead and move articles. If you can't move due to an "r caps" or whatever on the redirect, just change all the text then use a db-g6 or leave me or someone a note when you've done a whole group or something. Thanks! ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 21:16, 4 May 2014 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Accurate Image?

The current image of the 'dark form near Tarpon Springs, Florida' , is what I'm talking about. Though I'm inexperienced with the white morph, I'm wondering why this is not an intermediate morph? It has a lot more white than most Great Blue Herons that I regularly see in the Northeast. Do other birders have insight? Aythya affinis (talk) 15:35, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

Gallery 2022

Hello @Hike395: What in WP:IG requires removing the gallery entirely? Invasive Spices (talk) 23 September 2022 (UTC)

A gallery is not a tool to shoehorn images into an article, and a gallery consisting of an indiscriminate collection of images of the article subject should generally either be improved in accordance with the below paragraphs or moved to Wikimedia Commons. [...] A gallery section may be appropriate in some Wikipedia articles if a collection of images can illustrate aspects of a subject that cannot be easily or adequately described by text or individual images

The gallery used to contain these images:

• 
  Great Blue Heron flying over grass in the Everglades
• 
  Great blue heron, Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, Quebec, Canada
• 
  Wading at Grande Lakes Audubon Cooperative Wildlife Sanctuary, Orlando, FL
• 
  Eating a common snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina) hatchling
• 
  Two great blue herons in synchronous flight
• 
• 
  Great blue heron landing in the Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge in Delaware

This collection of images did not illustrate aspects that could not be described in text or individual images: they were an undifferentiated collection of blue heron images. — hike395 (talk) 13:39, 23 September 2022 (UTC)

I don't think this is indiscriminate. Each image is not redundant with any other. They all illustrate different activities of the species. Invasive Spices (talk) 23 September 2022 (UTC)

And File:Juvenile Great Blue Heron.jpg shows a juvenile one (with different coloration). Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 06:07, 24 September 2022 (UTC)

The guideline isn't simply that the images are non-redundant, but that they illustrate aspects that cannot be seen in individual images. There should be some structure to a gallery. For a positive example, see Marmot#Examples of species, which shows an image of each species of a genus. There's no structure here, just a set of images. — hike395 (talk) 15:28, 24 September 2022 (UTC)

Well, I think the one of the young bird is the only one that shows how they look different at that stage of life. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 21:38, 24 September 2022 (UTC)

I just added it as an individual image, to the "Breeding" section. — hike395 (talk) 22:37, 25 September 2022 (UTC)

Galleries are not restricted to individual species in genus articles. Invasive Spices (talk) 25 September 2022 (UTC)

I wasn't saying that. I was just giving an example of an image gallery that, IMO, fulfills the guidelines of WP:IG. There could be other ways. I just don't think the gallery, above, follows the guidelines, so I transwiki'ed it. — hike395 (talk) 22:37, 25 September 2022 (UTC)

Great blue down under

What variety is this? Spotted in Lane Cove National Park, Australia. Dicklyon (talk) 10:41, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

I think that's a white-faced heron, a very widespread bird in your area: Aus, NZ, New Guinea, Indonesia, many many islands including Tasmania, and a few stragglers have even been seen in China. They're never seen in very dry areas, but otherwise they're in all of Australia. They are (roughly) half the height and half the weight of a great blue heron. TooManyFingers (talk) 19:29, 18 June 2024 (UTC)