Yellow-crowned night herons hunt crayfish at dusk

Along the marshy edges near the Tidal Basin, the light holds long into the evening now. The days are at their longest, and in the hour before dark, yellow-crowned night herons move into the shallows. They are stocky, short-necked birds for a heron, built lower to the water than a great blue heron, and they move through the marsh with a patience that reads as deliberate. They are hunting.

The yellow-crowned night heron is a specialist in a way that most herons are not. While great blue herons take fish, frogs, and whatever else crosses their path, yellow-crowned night herons have organized much of their foraging life around crustaceans. Crayfish, in particular. Their bills are heavy and stout compared to other herons, reinforced enough to handle armored prey. Their eyes are adapted for low-light conditions, which is why they are out now, in the last hour of daylight and into dusk, when crayfish are most active in the shallows. A foraging bird will stand motionless for a stretch, then lunge, pinning a crayfish against the mud or lifting it free of the water entirely. Larger crayfish get battered against a hard surface before the bird swallows them. The heron flips them to go down headfirst, avoiding the claws.

Right now, this behavior is not just feeding. It is provisioning. Nests in the mid-Atlantic are active through early summer, and adults are moving between foraging sites and nest trees, carrying food back to nestlings. Yellow-crowned night herons tend to nest in wooded areas near water, often in small colonies, and the adults work the surrounding wetlands in shifts. The crayfish they pull from these shallows are calorie-dense and relatively easy to subdue compared to a fish that can twist free. For growing nestlings, that reliability matters. The marsh is not decorative here. It is functional infrastructure for the breeding effort happening in the trees nearby. If you are near the water's edge, look low along the bank. A yellow-crowned night heron standing still can be easy to miss; the gray and black patterning on the adult's head blends against shadow, and the bird does not flush easily.

Crayfish are not passive in this equation. They are nocturnal by preference, sheltering under rocks and debris during the day and moving into open shallows to feed after dark. The heron's crepuscular timing is not coincidence; it corresponds with the window when crayfish are most exposed. Several species of crayfish occupy the freshwater and brackish margins around the Washington area, and in summer their populations are large. Juveniles hatched earlier in the season are now active in the shallows, and these smaller individuals are well within the heron's range. The water temperature here is running warm, which keeps crayfish metabolism high and active, and keeps the herons well-supplied.

The great blue heron is present along this same shoreline, taller and more visible, and it will take a crayfish when one presents itself. But the yellow-crowned night heron does not compete with it directly. The two species are working different prey, different depths, different hours. The yellow-crowned is lower, slower, more deliberate in its search. It probes under overhanging banks. It waits near submerged root masses where crayfish shelter. The foraging style fits the prey.

The sun is down or nearly so where you are standing. The swifts that were cutting arcs overhead have pulled back. In the quiet that follows, listen for the yellow-crowned night heron's call, a short, sharp bark, higher-pitched than the great blue heron's, sometimes given when a bird lifts off the water and crosses to another section of marsh. It is not a frequent sound, but this is the hour when you are most likely to hear it. The water in the shallows barely moves.