It is known as the bihoreau violacé in French and the pedrete corona clara or yaboa común in some Spanish-speaking countries.

The yellow-crowned night heron was formally described by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in 1758 in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae.

[2] Linnaeus based his account on the "crested bittern" that had been described in 1729–1732 by the English naturalist Mark Catesby in the first volume of his The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands.

[3] Linnaeus specified the type locality as North America, but this has been restricted to the Carolinas following Catesby.

It takes about three years for yellow-crowned night herons to acquire the full physical appearance of adults.

Before that, the young birds show signs of immaturity, such as a brownish body, an overall greyish head, drab colors and spots and streaks on their plumage.

Yellow-crowned juveniles tend to stand straighter and have heavier bills and longer legs, and their spots and streaks are finer than those of the black-crowned.

The yellow-crowned night heron needs bushes or trees to build nests, although it will use rock ledges where vegetation is unavailable (for example, on cliffs).

Unlike the black-crowned night heron, the yellow-crowned does not mind living near humans and can be found in wooded neighborhoods, nesting on rooftops and driveways.

[11][12] The yellow-crowned night heron is found exclusively in the Americas, and its distribution depends closely on food (mainly crustaceans) availability.

], in addition to its winter and year-round range, it can be found in the south-east inland of the United States during breeding season, and additional isolated breeding colonies have been recorded even farther inland, all the way to the northern border of the United States.

The young beg for food with a soft chu-chu-chu call that becomes louder as the chicks grow older and more demanding.

At first, the male brings material (twigs, branches and such) for the female to build the nest, then both perform both roles.

Trees and bushes are the preferred location for nests, the herons will usually build in high branches away from the trunk.

They look nothing like the adults with their white-grey short, soft feathers, their wide blue eye-ring and their yellow bill.

The immature birds will roost with the adults until the end of the breeding season, after which they disperse to unknown destinations.

[citation needed] Like many other species of birds, the yellow-crowned night heron is an intermediate host and amplifier of the eastern equine encephalomyelitis (EEE) virus (sleeping sickness).

Because of the long distances over which yellow-crowned night herons travel during migration, they can carry the virus over larger geographical areas, becoming amplifiers of EEE.

In areas where the herons cohabit with people, they are often disturbed or shooed away from their nests if they get too close to human habitations.

Loss of habitat is another major threat to the yellow-crowned night heron, with the wetlands they favor regressing continually.

Additionally, in some part of the Americas such as Louisiana and the Bahamas, the meat of the yellow-crowned night heron is considered a delicacy, leading to illegal hunting of the fledgling.

[1][17] The yellow-crowned night heron is generally not considered a threatened species, as the population size is very large, its range is wide and it has a stable trend.

The yellow-crowned night heron was introduced in the Bermudas in the end of the 1970s as a means of biological control against land crabs, which were considered a pest as were digging holes in the golf courses and the population went out of control after the closely related Bermuda night heron went extinct in the 1600s.

As yellow-crowned night herons are opportunistic feeders, not specialist feeders like the Bermuda night heron which have since decimated native land crab populations and have been observed predating endemic and critically endangered Bermuda rock lizards.

[citation needed] In 2019, the yellow-crowned night heron was named the official bird of the City of Houston, Texas.