White-faced Heron at Point Impossible

Point Impossible is located in the Breamlea Flora and Fauna Reserve on Zeally Bay just east of Torquay, Victoria. The Point is a low rocky headland where Breamlea Creek, a tidal creek, discharges into the bay on the east side of the point. When we were there, the tide was at its lowest, exposing large areas of sand and sea-weed covered rock shelves. This is a popular surfing and dog-walking spot with many dogs on the beach off-leash in spite of the signs prohibiting this.

At first site there appeared to be few birds about however a closer scan of the exposed sand revealed about 30 Red-capped Plovers and 2 Hooded Plovers busy feeding. One of the plovers was a juvenile showing successful breeding in the season just finished. Beach nesting birds struggle on the Surf Coast due to the huge number of people visiting the beaches for recreation and dog exercise.

A scan of the rock shelves revealed about 20 loafing Silver Gulls, one distant Pacific Gull and a White-faced Heron (Egretta novaehollandiae) stalking prey in the rock pools. 

Please click on photos to enlarge.

The Heron looked into one pool intently, indicating it might be onto something. 

I checked the two photos above to make sure my light settings were ok for the overcast-sky conditions and while checking, the Heron captured a small fish. I thought the Heron showed experience when it immediately flew a short distance away from water to deal with the struggling fish so if it dropped the fish it could not easily escape into a weedy rock pool. 

However this gave time for five of the nearby loafing but ever opportunistic Silver Gulls to fly in and harass the Heron with the hope of pirating its meal. 

Again demonstrating experience the Heron was not distracted by the pesky gulls and soon swallowed its catch. 

With the fish gone, the gulls soon departed, leaving the Heron to continue hunting in the Point Impossible rock pools while the tide was low.

Note: You might have noticed from the scientific name in brackets above that the White-faced Heron is in fact an egret being in the genus Egretta. But, in the vernacular, “egret” applies to herons that are white, for example Great, Intermediate and Cattle Egrets which are in the genus Ardea and are herons. In these examples of a heron and some egrets, the vernacular names are in a way the opposite to the taxonomic genus, and thus the vernacular names have no taxonomic significance.