Intermediate Egrets eat small fish, frogs and insect. They stalk for their prey on mud, grass or shallow water. They prefer to hunt in freshwater (marshes, cultivated fields), but are also found in mangroves, mudflats, estuaries. They prefer to roost in reedbeds, but will also roost in mangroves.
Intermediate Egrets are less common than the Little or Great Egrets. But they often hunt and roost with these other egrets as well as other herons. They are often confused with the Great Egret, but their noticeably shorter bills help to sort things out.
Habitat
The species inhabits lowlands from sea-level to 1000 m in Sumatra, and 1450 m in Nepal. It shows a preference for sheltered flood-plains and seasonal wetlands with water less than 80 mm deep and emergent grasses, herbs, sedges, reeds or rushes and abundant aquatic vegetation (generally avoiding areas where vegetation is too thick for feeding). Such habitats include seasonally flooded marshes, inland deltas(e.g. Okavango Basin, Botswana), ponds, swamp forest, freshwater swamps, pools, rivers, streams, rice-fields, the margins of freshwater, brackish and saltwater lakes, wet meadows, and flooded and dry pasture near water. It occurs less often in coastal habitats, but may roost in mangrove swamps, and frequents mudflats, tidal estuaries, coastal lagoons, saltmarshes, and tidal streams and rivers.
Food
In aquatic habitats the diet of this species consists predominantly of fish less than 10 cm long (including eels, perch Macquaria, gudgeon and mosquitofish Gambusia), as well as frogs, crustaceans (e.g. crayfish) and aquatic insects (e.g. leeches, water bugs and dragonfly larvae). It will also take terrestrial prey in drier habitats including grasshoppers mole crickets, bugs and beetles, snakes, spiders, lizards and exceptionally birds.
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