Ardea melanocephala
Drawn from open occurrence records in and around Ngorongoro Conservation Area, aggregated onto a 25 km grid. A cell is matched by its centre, which can sit up to 16 km outside the boundary, so this covers the surrounding country too.
Occurrence records measure where people looked and found something, which is not the same as where the animal is. This is a relative likelihood, not a probability.
Records exist for January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November and December, with the widest coverage in January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, November and December. A quiet month can mean the animal was absent, or that nobody was looking.
A grid cell is a square of the map, not a sighting: 5 squares of 25 km carry records for Black-headed Heron in and around Ngorongoro Conservation Area, and the 4,009 records behind them were collected by other people and published openly. Nothing here counts animals, and a place with more records is not always a place with more animals.
Addo Elephant National Park, Garden Route National Park and the Serengeti are among 23 atlas places where the Black-headed Heron is recorded. Its records concentrate in South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe, and the map follows where these records gather most thickly. The atlas holds about 177,000 records of the species across 13 countries.
Of the 82 species with an atlas page recorded in and around Ngorongoro Conservation Area, the Black-headed Heron is the 6th most recorded.
The full atlas page, and everywhere else it is recorded