Black-crowned Night Heron

The black-crowned night-heron (Nycticorax nycticorax), or black-capped night-heron, commonly shortened to just night-heron in Eurasia, is a medium-sized heron found throughout a large part of the world, including parts of Europe, Asia, and North and South America. In Australasia it is replaced by the closely related nankeen night-heron (N. caledonicus), with which it has hybridized in the area of contact. Taxonomy The black-crowned night-heron was formally described by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in 1758 in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae. He placed it with herons, cranes and egrets in the genus Ardea and coined the binomial name Ardea nicticorax. It is now placed in the genus Nycticorax that was introduced in 1817 by the English naturalist Thomas Forster for this species. The epithet nycticorax is from Ancient Greek and combines nux, nuktos meaning "night" and korax meaning "raven". The word was used by authors such as Aristotle and Hesychius of Miletus for a "bird of ill omen", perhaps an owl. The word was used by the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner in 1555 and then by subsequent authors for a black-crowned night-heron. Four subspecies are recognised: N. n. nycticorax (Linnaeus, 1758) – Eurasia south to Africa and Madagascar and east to east Asia, Philippines and Indonesian Archipelago N. n. hoactli (Gmelin, 1789) – south Canada to north Argentina and Chile; Hawaii N. n. obscurus (Bonaparte, 1855) – Chile and southwest Argentina N. n. falklandicus (Hartert, EJO, 1914) – Falkland Islands In the Falkland Islands, the bird is called quark, which is an onomatopoeia similar to its name in many other languages, like qua-bird in English, in Dutch and West Frisian, in Czech, in Ukrainian, in Russian, in Vietnamese, in Indonesian, and in Quechua.