Shoebill Crane -- in Connecticut?!

Still not as good as the Shoebill in Rotherham!

For a big bird that spends a lot of time standing around (as storks do) they appear to have an aversion to people putting their hand in a pocket to grab a phone to film them and then, once a phone is produced, the big bird disappears without any trace. Phone phobia and Houdini like escapology skills are obviously Shoebill traits. Every day a school day.
 
Lafone said:
once a phone is produced, the big bird disappears without any trace. Phone phobia and Houdini like escapology skills are obviously Shoebill traits.
Click to expand...
This of course means that not having any photographic proof of a shoebill in Connecticut or Rotherham, is the ultimate proof of a shoebill existing there. If a shoebill is ever photographed, we can be sure that the animal pictured isn't a shoebill due to its bigfoot-like skills.
 
I mean... in the case we're sitting on the funniest and most mysterious bird sighting ever, I still have to ask @Bri : Could the bird you saw have been a Boat-billed Heron instead of a Shoebill ?

It wouldn't be so surprising if a random bystander saw this strange bird and confused it with an even stranger bird, trying to identify it.

I also think we're dealing with an obsessed user, but even if that's the case, I still NEED to know.
 
jopif said:
I mean... in the case we're sitting on the funniest and most mysterious bird sighting ever, I still have to ask @Bri : Could the bird you saw have been a Boat-billed Heron instead of a Shoebill ?

It wouldn't be so surprising if a random bystander saw this strange bird and confused it with an even stranger bird, trying to identify it.

I also think we're dealing with an obsessed user, but even if that's the case, I still NEED to know.
Click to expand...
It was likely some sort of heron, or just a lie in the first place. There is no doubt in my mind it is a bird like the black crowned night heron, or the user is lying. So practically just take this entire thread for a grain of salt, or a good laugh.
 
USZOOfan42 said:
It was likely some sort of heron, or just a lie in the first place. There is no doubt in my mind it is a bird like the black crowned night heron, or the user is lying. So practically just take this entire thread for a grain of salt, or a good laugh.
Click to expand...
That's what I'm doing, I just love this type of interaction to be honest.
It's like talking to the crazy man in the bus as we say in France. :D

Whether he's lying, misidentified or has actually seen a SHOEBILL IN CONNECTICUT????? I'm fine with either situation
 
Alright, I went down the rabbithole, and here’s what I’ve found. :cool:

First of all, I want to say that I don’t think this is a hoax in the malicious or trolling sense. I believe JZinCT genuinely saw something unusual and is honestly trying to make sense of it. That being said, the bird in question was certainly not a Shoebill.

Let’s break this down:

1. JZinCT = Pearly
On June 24, 2024, user JZinCT posted a message here on ZooChat where he explained that he (and two others) had seen a huge, strange bird with a “shoebox bill” perched in a tree in Connecticut. After googling, he came to believe it was a Shoebill.

Turns out, the exact same post (with only slight wording variations) had already appeared the day before, on a forum called DefendingTheTruth.com under the username Pearly.
Here’s the thread if you’re curious (it’s worth reading, trust me) :
Shoebill Crane In My Backyard

It includes more context that JZinCT didn’t mention here :

Pearly says he posted the sighting on the local ‘Nextdoor’ website so that neighbors could keep an eye out. (can't find it)

He said a sighting had already occurred in 2018. (I haven't found anything on this either)

He adds that his son saw it fly, and describes a “huge wingspan and long legs.”

Multiple times, he says the bird was not nearly the size of a full-grown Shoebill (after he saw videos), and that it only looked big when perched, not massive. He highly considers the possibility that it might have been a juvenile Shoebill, and even floats the idea that it escaped from a private owner. He said the bird looked EXACTLY like a juvenile shoebill. :D
So far, still a misidentification, but an honest one.

2. Who is Bri ?
Over a year later, in July 2025, a brand new ZooChat account named Bri appears in this thread and backs up the story, saying “my daughter and I saw that bird too!”

At first glance, this seems incredible: two different people in Connecticut saw the same improbable bird ? So... Is Bri a JZinCT sockpuppet ?

Things that make it look like Bri is indeed a sockpuppet :
Same exact story structure: “Saw a weird bird with a huge bill. Didn’t get a photo. Still thinking about it.” The wording is eerily similar.

Same timeframe and (presumably) the same location.

Bri says her daughter saw it with her, while Pearly says it was his son – yet Pearly accidentally says “with her own eyes” when talking about “my son.” This could be a slip, revealing that the story was actually about his daughter and he was trying to mask that.

Bri’s message has no history or other posts, and popped up right after the thread had been dormant for months, just to say “yes I saw it too, you're not crazy”.

But to be fair… maybe Bri isn’t Pearly
If we dig a little deeper, there are some differences between Bri and Pearly that are hard to reconcile if they’re the same person :

Pearly repeatedly says the bird was not as big as the Shoebills he saw online and only speculates it might have been a juvenile. Bri, on the other hand, is fully convinced it was an actual Shoebill.

Pearly seems uncertain and defensive in tone (“maybe it escaped from someone...”), while Bri seems very confident in the ID, I really want to emphasize about the fact that I don't think that Pearly is an obsessed conspirationist (I might have been deep enough in my OSINT to back that, I actually think i’m way more crazy than him unfortunately, truly, I found things I SHOULD NOT have found...).

It’s also possible that Pearly purposely changed “daughter” to “son” in order to anonymize details, and that the gender confusion (“her own eyes”) was an honest typo rather than a Freudian slip.

So yeah, I’m leaving a sliver of room for coincidence here. What's more, my research has shown that Shoebill sightings in the US are by no means rare. :rolleyes:

Conclusion
In all likelihood, JZinCT probably did see an unusual bird. The Shoebill ID is clearly a misidentification (my bet is a Heron species). As for Bri, the sockpuppet theory is tempting, but not 100% airtight. Either way, I can confirm that no Shoebill flew over Connecticut unfortunately. Perhaps a new species of prehistoric shoebox bird appeared in Connecticut in June 2024 ?
 
Personally, the fact that the OP said it on two forums makes it hard for me to believe they were trolling. For the same reason I don't think this new account is a sockpuppet, although in their instance they absolutely could be a troll.

But the complete impossibility of it being a Shoebill, combined with their statements about it appearing to be a juvenile, leaves me believing it was a Boat-billed Heron. I have no idea how common this species is in private hands in the United States but I find the idea of one escaping and ending up in that part of the country far more plausible.

It is easy to misidentify things when caught off guard by them. Once when I was younger, I saw an otter and thought it was some sort of serpentine monster until another observer told me what it was, by which time it was gone. Reminiscing on what I thought it looked like at the time, I still don't see much otter resemblance.

If the OP saw the mysterious bird, had no idea what it was but noted its strangely large beak, then the rest of its appearance could easily be distorted in their memory when looking back on it.
 
This whole saga has been entertaining to follow. While I naturally do not believe these are actual shoebills, I'd love to know what the truth behind these reports are, if anything.

Funnily enough, I just found additional shoebill sightings being claimed in Florida and Michigan (the latter of which designates them as "shoebill herons", a nice complement to this thread's "shoebill cranes"). Various search engines are also showing me TikTok results implying sightings in various other US states, but when I click on them, I just get unrelated shoebill videos that don't match the title. Guess my age is starting to show because I genuinely don't know how TikTok's tags are supposed to work. Still, it's interesting that this thread isn't an isolated incident.
 
A co worker once assured me that she had seen killer whales at Valencia Oceanografic. Another one saw sharks at Zaragoza Aquarium. No matter how I tried to explain why it was imposible. They had been there and in their minds, was obvious they were right, because they saw it and me, no. Sometimes people simply are not interested on the truth. I'm sure the people on this thread saw a bird they never had seen before, probably some heron. They had no idea about the species but were curious, so googled something like "grey bird with big beak", a picture of a shoebill appeared on the search results, and there you have this.
 
As someone who constantly deals with people who know nothing about birds asking me what a bird they saw is, people who are unfamiliar with bird ID seem to make up bizarre features and misinterpret what they see all the time. Last week, a coworker told me about a bird he saw that was "black and white with an all yellow tail". I eventually came to the realization that the bird was a Cedar Waxwing.

Boat-billed Herons, while certainly present in private hands in the US, are not common. In fact, there are no records of an escaped Boat-billed Heron ever being documented in the US (which is quite unusual considering the many, many odd escapees that have documented over the years). While a Boat-billed Heron is strictly speaking more likely than a Shoebill, this is basically only by technicality. I have no doubt the original poster saw a heron, but it was not a Boat-billed. It was probably either a Great Blue Heron or a Black-crowned Night-Heron. They saw it has a long bill, looked up "large bird with huge bill" or something like that, and Shoebill is what came up.
 
Merintia said:
A co worker once assured me that she had seen killer whales at Valencia Oceanografic. Another one saw sharks at Zaragoza Aquarium. No matter how I tried to explain why it was imposible. They had been there and in their minds, was obvious they were right, because they saw it and me, no. Sometimes people simply are not interested on the truth. I'm sure the people on this thread saw a bird they never had seen before, probably some heron. They had no idea about the species but were curious, so googled something like "grey bird with big beak", a picture of a shoebill appeared on the search results, and there you have this.
Click to expand...
I’ve met someone adamant they’d seen Giant Pandas at Whipsnade and another convinced there are Polar Bears at Colchester, with both referring to visits during the 2010s. The former in particular refused to accept empirical evidence presented to the contrary, and eventually I decided to cave in and tell them that perhaps Whipsnade acquired some recently without me knowing.
 
I've been watching this thread with amusement and agree with most of the comments above.

Having seen wild shoebills in Africa, I would have to say there is no bird that is easier to photograph (finding them is slightly more difficult). So, in this day and age I would say that no photo means no sighting.

A friend of mine has a way of responding to these situations. He says "there may be something in what you have to say" then changes the subject.
 
A funny coincidence just occurred to me - and in this case it *is* a coincidence, as the identity of the first Shoebill hoaxer I alluded to when this thread was started is known, and they most certainly are not the OP of this thread nor the new claimant :D to wit, the new claimant posted on the tenth anniversary of the original Shoebill hoaxer and their posts!
 
It was the rare Oozalum Bird from Carry On Up The Jungle. Disappears up its own fundament!
 
Kalaw said:
leaves me believing it was a Boat-billed Heron. I have no idea how common this species is in private hands in the United States but I find the idea of one escaping and ending up in that part of the country far more plausible.
Click to expand...

birdsandbats said:
Boat-billed Herons, while certainly present in private hands in the US, are not common.
Click to expand...

I would be curious on any sources of privately held Boat-bills, as per previous rummaging around the internet as well as current, I have never found anything to even indicate they are privately held. There are zero non-AZA with them far as I'm aware, not even Wildlife World or Sylvan Heights. Wouldn't be terribly surprised if maybe somebody's got one, but i find the chances to be very very low. They're odd looking but they're primarily nocturnal, shy, and require an expensive diet - not a species that particularly lends itself to the avian trade.

Also, given the Boat-bill is a decent bit smaller than even the night-heron *plus* being shy and largely nocturnal, I find it a very unlikely candidate for a "large bird with long legs" seen in apparent broad daylight. My bets are on either a Great Blue Heron or a teleporting Shoebill who errored the calculations. :p
 
Great Argus said:
I would be curious on any sources of privately held Boat-bills, as per previous rummaging around the internet as well as current, I have never found anything to even indicate they are privately held. There are zero non-AZA with them far as I'm aware, not even Wildlife World or Sylvan Heights. Wouldn't be terribly surprised if maybe somebody's got one, but i find the chances to be very very low. They're odd looking but they're primarily nocturnal, shy, and require an expensive diet - not a species that particularly lends itself to the avian trade.

Also, given the Boat-bill is a decent bit smaller than even the night-heron *plus* being shy and largely nocturnal, I find it a very unlikely candidate for a "large bird with long legs" seen in apparent broad daylight. My bets are on either a Great Blue Heron or a teleporting Shoebill who errored the calculations. :p
Click to expand...
Honestly I suppose I don't have any sources for privately owned Boat-bills. I thought I saw one at a roadside zoo once but looking back at my species list for that place it is not listed so perhaps I am misremembering.
 
It's worth mentioning that there are zero wild, verifiable observations of Boat-billed Heron outside of its natural range (which does not include any part of the US) on iNaturalist (a few people did upload observations of captive specimens, but those are correctly tagged as such). So I don't even think an escapee being confused for the Shoebill is even remotely plausible either.

OP saw a native bird and didn't immediately recognize it, so in their excitement, they got themselves hyped up into thinking they saw something unusual and novel, and allowed said excitement to get the better of them, leading to the misidentification.

Trust me, I've been there as well. I've had my moments of misidentifying wildlife thinking I got myself a lifer, only to discover later it was something I have already seen.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top