It’s the avian equivalent of a Honus Wagner baseball card—and it’s arrived in Brooklyn.
A rare Western Reef Heron was spotted this week in Calvert Vaux Park, just north of Coney Island Creek, the first recorded sighting of the creature in New York State.
The news sent bird enthusiasts flocking to the waterfront location, hoping to capture on film what some described as a once-in-a-lifetime bird.
The Western Reef Heron is native to Africa and India. No one is sure how the bird made it this far, and there is some speculation that it is the same bird that was spotted last year in Maine and New Hampshire.
Bay Ridge resident and birder Alex Wilson was first to spot the medium-sized heron with distinctive yellow feet, just the third time the species has ever been spotted in North America, according to experts.
Still, he admitted, “I was excited for sure.”
The bird is so uncommon in these parts, it wasn’t even in the field guide Wilson was carrying.
He quickly alerted fellow birders, who posted the news on e-mail groups and on websites devoted to the popular hobby. “This is a bird that doesn’t belong here and is not expected here,” Wilson explained.
On Monday, the bird returned, wading in the water at low tide, searching for food. Western Reef Heron dine on fish, crustaceans and mollusks.
Shane Blodgett, a licensed tour guide and bird enthusiast from Ditmas Park, noted that the Western Reef Heron is not known as a long-distance migrant, further deepening the mystery of how it managed to make it to Brooklyn.
He said one theory is that the bird could have been brought across the ocean via the same weather patterns that form hurricanes.
“For it to show up anywhere in North America…it’s quite a happening,” Blodgett continued. “This is once in a lifetime.”
The bird’s arrival is not without some controversy.
Feathers might be ruffled, as “[s]ome experts think that the bird is [actually] a dark morph subspecies of the Little Egret,” Wilson noted.
