Animalia > Chordata > Aves > Pelecaniformes > Ardeidae > Ardea > Ardea herodias

Ardea herodias (Great Blue Heron)

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Wikipedia Abstract

The great blue heron (Ardea herodias) is a large wading bird in the heron family Ardeidae, common near the shores of open water and in wetlands over most of North America and Central America, as well as the Caribbean and the Galápagos Islands. It is a rare vagrant to in coastal Spain, the Azores, and areas of far southern Europe. An all-white population found only in the Caribbean and Florida was once treated as a separate species and known as the great white heron.
View Wikipedia Record: Ardea herodias

Infraspecies

Ardea herodias cognata
Ardea herodias fannini (Northwest coast heron)
Ardea herodias herodias (Great blue heron)
Ardea herodias occidentalis (Great white heron)
Ardea herodias wardi

EDGE Analysis

Uniqueness Scale: Similiar (0) 
2
 Unique (100)
Uniqueness & Vulnerability Scale: Similiar & Secure (0) 
19
 Unique & Vulnerable (100)
ED Score: 6.40902
EDGE Score: 2.0027
Learn more at EDGE of Existence programme

Attributes

Clutch Size [7]  4
Clutches / Year [4]  2
Fledging [2]  60 days
Incubation [4]  28 days
Mating System [8]  Monogamy
Maximum Longevity [4]  25 years
Snout to Vent Length [2]  38 inches (97 cm)
Water Biome [1]  Lakes and Ponds, Rivers and Streams, Coastal
Wing Span [9]  6.002 feet (1.83 m)
Adult Weight [2]  5.364 lbs (2.433 kg)
Birth Weight [4]  50 grams
Female Weight [6]  4.652 lbs (2.11 kg)
Male Weight [6]  5.467 lbs (2.48 kg)
Weight Dimorphism [6]  17.5 %
Breeding Habitat [3]  Wetlands
Wintering Geography [3]  Widespread
Wintering Habitat [3]  Wetlands, Coastal saltmarshes, Agricultural
Diet [5]  Carnivore (Invertebrates), Carnivore (Vertebrates), Piscivore
Diet - Ectothermic [5]  10 %
Diet - Endothermic [5]  10 %
Diet - Fish [5]  50 %
Diet - Invertibrates [5]  30 %
Forages - Ground [5]  40 %
Forages - Water Surface [5]  60 %
Female Maturity [4]  1 year 10 months
Male Maturity [4]  1 year 10 months

Ecoregions

Protected Areas

+ Click for partial list (100)Full list (316)

Ecosystems

Important Bird Areas

Name Location  IBA Criteria   Website   Climate   Land Use 
Belize Coastal and near shore islands Belize A1, A2, A3, A4i
Belize Off-shore and Barrier Islands Belize A1, A2, A4i, A4ii
Crooked Tree and associated wetlands Belize A1, A2, A3, A4i, A4iii
Northeastern Belize Belize A1, A2, A3

Biodiversity Hotspots

Habitat Vegetation Classification

Name Location  Website 
Bald-cypress - Water Tupelo Floodplain Forest United States (Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, Illinois, Arkansas, Texas, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi)
Bald-cypress Floodplain Forest United States (Oklahoma, South Carolina, Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, Indiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Kentucky, Illinois, Florida, Louisiana, Virginia, Missouri, Texas)
Central Interior Buttonbush Pond United States (Kentucky, Oklahoma, Alabama, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, West Virginia, Illinois, Ohio, Arkansas, Tennessee)
Midwest Mixed Emergent Deep Marsh Canada (Ontario); United States (Missouri, Tennessee, Iowa, South Dakota, Illinois, Nebraska, North Dakota, Kentucky, Alabama, Ohio, Indiana, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin)
Midwestern Cottonwood - Black Willow - Silver Maple Floodplain Forest United States (Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Ohio, Nebraska, Kansas, Michigan, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana)
Mississippi River Red Maple - Water-locust Bottomland Forest United States (Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas)
Pond-cypress / Myrtle Dahoon Depression Forest United States (Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina, Florida)
Southeast Coastal Plain Buttonbush Pond United States (Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, South Carolina, Kentucky, Georgia)
Southern Green Ash - Elm - Sugarberry Floodplain Forest United States (Illinois, Indiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Missouri, Alabama)
Water Tupelo Swamp Forest United States (Florida, Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina, Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, Illinois, Louisiana, Kentucky, Georgia)

Prey / Diet

Prey / Diet Overlap

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Predators

Aquila chrysaetos (Golden Eagle)[11]
Buteo jamaicensis (Red-tailed Hawk)[10]
Haliaeetus leucocephalus (Bald Eagle)[11]
Procyon lotor (Raccoon)[10]

Providers

Consumers

Range Map

External References

NatureServe Explorer

Citations

Attributes / relations provided by
♦ 1Myers, P., R. Espinosa, C. S. Parr, T. Jones, G. S. Hammond, and T. A. Dewey. 2006. The Animal Diversity Web (online). Accessed February 01, 2010 at animaldiversity.org
♦ 2Nathan P. Myhrvold, Elita Baldridge, Benjamin Chan, Dhileep Sivam, Daniel L. Freeman, and S. K. Morgan Ernest. 2015. An amniote life-history database to perform comparative analyses with birds, mammals, and reptiles. Ecology 96:3109
♦ 3Partners in Flight Avian Conservation Assessment Database, version 2017. Accessed on January 2018.
♦ 4de Magalhaes, J. P., and Costa, J. (2009) A database of vertebrate longevity records and their relation to other life-history traits. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 22(8):1770-1774
♦ 5Hamish Wilman, Jonathan Belmaker, Jennifer Simpson, Carolina de la Rosa, Marcelo M. Rivadeneira, and Walter Jetz. 2014. EltonTraits 1.0: Species-level foraging attributes of the world's birds and mammals. Ecology 95:2027
♦ 6Butler, RW 1992. Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias). In The Birds of North America, No. 25 (A. Poole, P. Stettenheim and F. Gill, Eds.). Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, and American Ornithologists' Union, Washington, DC.
♦ 7Jetz W, Sekercioglu CH, Böhning-Gaese K (2008) The Worldwide Variation in Avian Clutch Size across Species and Space PLoS Biol 6(12): e303. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060303
♦ 8Terje Lislevand, Jordi Figuerola, and Tamás Székely. 2007. Avian body sizes in relation to fecundity, mating system, display behavior, and resource sharing. Ecology 88:1605
♦ 9New York State Department of Environmental Conservation
♦ 10Study of Northern Virginia Ecology
♦ 11Jorrit H. Poelen, James D. Simons and Chris J. Mungall. (2014). Global Biotic Interactions: An open infrastructure to share and analyze species-interaction datasets. Ecological Informatics.
♦ 12Lafferty, K. D., R. F. Hechinger, J. C. Shaw, K. L. Whitney and A. M. Kuris (in press) Food webs and parasites in a salt marsh ecosystem. In Disease ecology: community structure and pathogen dynamics (eds S. Collinge and C. Ray). Oxford University Press, Oxford.
♦ 13Geomys bursarius (Rodentia: Geomyidae), MATTHEW B. CONNIOR, MAMMALIAN SPECIES 43(879):104–117 (2011)
♦ 14Cirtwill, Alyssa R.; Eklöf, Anna (2018), Data from: Feeding environment and other traits shape species' roles in marine food webs, Dataset, https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.1mv20r6
♦ 15Food Web Relationships of Northern Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca : a Synthesis of the Available Knowledge, Charles A. Simenstad, Bruce S. Miller, Carl F. Nyblade, Kathleen Thornburgh, and Lewis J. Bledsoe, EPA-600 7-29-259 September 1979
♦ 16National Geographic Magazine - May 2016 - Yellowstone - The Carnivore Comeback
♦ 17Anurans as prey: an exploratory analysis and size relationships between predators and their prey, L. F. Toledo, R. S. Ribeiro & C. F. B. Haddad, Journal of Zoology 271 (2007) 170–177
♦ 18Thomomys bottae, Cheri A. Jones and Colleen N. Baxter, MAMMALIAN SPECIES No. 742, pp. 1–14 (2004)
♦ 19Gibson, D. I., Bray, R. A., & Harris, E. A. (Compilers) (2005). Host-Parasite Database of the Natural History Museum, London
Ecoregions provided by World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF). WildFinder: Online database of species distributions, ver. 01.06 Wildfinder Database
Biodiversity Hotspots provided by Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund
Abstract provided by DBpedia licensed under a Creative Commons License
Species taxanomy provided by GBIF Secretariat (2022). GBIF Backbone Taxonomy. Checklist dataset https://doi.org/10.15468/39omei accessed via GBIF.org on 2023-06-13; License: CC BY 4.0