Its Heron time!

While heading across the Plain this morning I noticed a birder peering into a scope so stopped to enquire what he was looking at. That was a Brown Falcon, but he said he'd had 2 possible Australasian Bitterns fly out of a hawthorn across a paddock and land some distance away in a creek line.  My pulse rate eventually dropped to about 180.

After quickly contacting the landholder we set off to look for the birds where he thought they'd landed.   A first bizarre sight was a White-necked Heron perched on some power lines.

Another bird of the same species nearly joined it, but couldn't work out the balance and landed in the creek.

A White-faced Heron had avoided the wires and perched on the power pole.

We were looking in the creek and its vegetation for the possible Bitterns but suddenly noticed two large brown lumbering heron-like things were flying across the paddock.  We had passed them and they flushed behind us. At least one landed in the Molonglo on the Northern side of the low-level crossing (accessible from the road).  

On entering that area we soon spotted a bird ignoring the reeds and clambering about in some flood debris.  With a good look I am pretty confident this bird (and thus, logically, also the other) were in fact Juvenile Nankeen Night-Herons.

Not as good a bird as the Bittern would have been but still a good tick for this area (and of course "Bird of the Day).