AMBER'S ANIMAL TALES AROUND AUSTIN VOL. 3/22/08 - Great Blue Heron or Blue Crane?

Saturday before Easter I was blessed by a wild, big blue bird who sat still in one of the ponds at home long enough for me to snap several dozen pictures of her. I believe she sat patiently for so long in order to catch fish. She watched the surface of the water constantly and let me get within 50 feet of her several times, without flying away. I think she stayed at the pond all day. I shot the first round of pictures around 11:00 AM, another round again at 3:00 PM & the last round at 5:00 PM.

I think she is a Great Blue Heron, though someone said she is a Blue Crane, too small of a bird to be a Blue Heron. But when I looked her up online the pictures of the Blue Herons looked more like her then the pictures of the Blue Cranes did. Besides, Blue Crane may be another name for the same kind of bird. I believe Herons are Cranes, or at least they are very closely related. I would love to hear from an expert who knows the difference between Blue Herons & Blue Cranes.

9-27-08 Correction - From Smithsonian Field Guide to Birds of North America, page 109
I think this bird is a Yellow-crowned Night-Heron

There are probably too many pictures here. I could not choose which pictures I liked the best. I shot all of these pictures using a Kodak Easy Share Z710 camera. The pictures were cropped & shrank for ease of use on the Internet. I performed no other fancy electronic editing techniques on these photos.