Little Blue Heron by John Sill © Massachusetts Audubon Society. Courtesy of the Museum of American Bird Art.
Little Blue Heron by John Sill © Massachusetts Audubon Society. Courtesy of the Museum of American Bird Art.
Little Blue Heron
In the early history of North American ornithology, three names stand out as giants: John James Audubon, Alexander Wilson, and Mark Catesby. Mark Catesby is arguably the least known among the three, but he came first chronologically and began the process of documenting the natural history of the New World well before either Wilson or Audubon. Among many other bird species, Catesby described what he called the Blue Heron. Later he described a second species that he called the Little White Heron. Both were included in his famous book, The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1731). As the oft stated phrase goes, we now know the Little White Heron is in reality an immature Little Blue Heron and not a separate species. But we did not know that when Alexander Wilson was alive during the early years of the nineteenth century, well after Catesby. Wilson also thought that immature Little Blue Herons were, in fact, Little White Herons. It was John James Audubon and his collaborator John Bachman who later sorted it out by seeing transitional pied birds and finally realizing that the little white heron is actually an immature Little Blue Heron (Egretta caerulea), and that it molts into the blue plumage as it attains full adulthood. Knowledge does not always come fast, but it does tend to come.
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