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It has become commonplace to hear about birds eating fish. The
government gets out reports on the relation of fish-eating birds to
fish abundance. The cries of commercial fisheries have caused inquiries
to be instituted into the food of cormorants that were supposed to be
eating the fish before they grew up enough for us to eat. The scarcity
of salmon in some of our Northeastern streams has caused the allocation
of biologists to study the predation of kingfisher and merganser on
salmon fry and fingerlings.
But fish get some of their own back by eating birds. It's not as spot
news as the "man bites dog" angle, but it's certainly less widely
known.
To one who has fished for large-mouth black bass among the cypress
trees and the bonnets of water hyacinth, and seen the bass strike
savagely at surface lures as soon as they hit the surface, it comes as
no surprise to find they strike at, and catch, such birds as Maryland
yellow-throats that flutter across close to the surface of the water.
Young ducks, too, are good game to the large-mouth, and probably many
a young duck finds its way into the maw of a bass. On a pond where
bass had taken many young ducks I heard a story of a fisherman who
made a floating model of a mother duck, powered it with a propeller,
and attached to it by lines of various lengths several floating models
of downy ducklings. In each duckling was concealed a hook. The whole
flotilla was set afloat, and drifted across the pond. Mother steamed
ahead, with young following. Soon the bass, used to a duck diet, began
to grab the ducklings. When the model was retrieved several large bass
were taken.
In Northern waters, where Northern pike, or jackfish, as they're called
in the North, abound in duck-nesting waters, pike are accused of eating
enough ducklings to affect the survival of the broods. Many a marshland
traveler has reported young ducks and young grebes diving, to be seen
no more. He's blamed the pike. Sometimes perhaps the young bird has
simply come up unobserved. But enough pike's stomachs have proved
to have young ducks in them to demonstrate pike do eat ducklings.
Strangely, in some areas, pike eat many ducklings; in others they do
not eat them. But it's not alone young birds or small birds that get
eaten by fish.
A twenty-four-inch bass is recorded as having been caught while it
still had the legs of a full-grown coot projecting from its mouth. From
beak to tip of its outstretched legs the coot measured seventeen inches
and it weighed one and one quarter pounds.
Angler fish weighing between forty and fifty pounds have been found
to have eaten birds. One had the band from a Manx shearwater in its
stomach, and another had an adult American merganser. In tropical and
subtropical seas the examination of birds seemed to indicate they had
been attacked by some fish and seized by the feet, but were able to
escape, and a white-winged black tern off Corsica has been seen to
disappear under the water, presumably dragged under by a fish.