Its from the book "Becoming a Tiger", by Susan McCarthy. Pg 215. Its a short section, I'll type it out real quick.
The Compleat Angler (not sure why its spelled like that)
Some green-backed herons practice bait fishing. In 1958, in an idle hour, biologists tossed a piece of bread to a heron, who surprised them by putting it in the water. He moved it closer when it drifted away, chased away coots that wanted to eat it, and caught small fish that came to sample it. When he noticed a lot of fish in an adjacent area, he carried the bread over there.
Herons not supplied with bread have been seen using twigs, leaves, berries, pieces of bark, moss, or styrofoam for this purpose. Others have been reported to catch insects or worms for bait. If all a heron has is a twig, and the twig is too long, the heron may break it to a more alluring size, according to an observer in Kyushu, Japan- though American and African herons haven't been spotted doing this. A heron in Miami was photographed using fish food pellets to attract fish to their doom. His mother and little brother bait-fished too.
Juvenile green-backed herons aren't the best fishermen, as they often neglect to crouch down, and thus scare the fish away. "The young birds sometimes resort to eating the insects and earthworms themselves," reports zoologist Hiroyoshi Higuchi. Of three herons Higuchi observed, A and B were handicapped by inferior fishing territories but also by their tendency to use overly large bait. Heron C, in addition to having a territory that made it easy to crouch out of sight of the fish, selected his lures more judiciously.
Although green-backed herons are found all over the place, they've been spotted using this technique only in Japan, south Florida, and western Africa. People have tried to teach herons to do it, without success. There are scattered reports of a few other birds fishing with bait: some African pied kingfishers, a captive squacco heron, and a captive sun bittern. Maybe it is the sort of thing that a bird that spends hours staring at the water is inclined to invent once in a great while. And that other such birds are then inclined to pick up from them. Biologists James Gould and Carol Grant Gould suggest that it is "discovered by the Einsteins among the herons, and learned from them only by the brightest of their neighbors."
