A young Yellow Crowned Night Heron perches on a tree limb in a area of NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

A young Yellow-Crowned Night Heron perches on a tree limb in a wooded area of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Its habitat is wooded swamps and coastal thickets, ranging from Massachusetts to Florida, west to Texas, and north along the Mississippi River. The Center shares a boundary with the 92,000-acre Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, which is a habitat for more than 310 species of birds, 25 mammals, 117 fishes and 65 amphibians and reptiles. The marshes and open water of the refuge also provide wintering areas for 23 species of migratory waterfowl, as well as a year-round home for great blue herons, great egrets, wood storks, cormorants, brown pelicans and other species of marsh and shore birds.