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Most birds prey on animals enough weaker than themselves to be in no
danger from their prey; their hunting is more like that of the gunner
after rabbits than that of the hunter after lions. But there are
exceptions.
The great blue heron, armed with a spearheadlike bill, lives largely
on fish. These it spears in the water, stalking about after them on
its long legs, or waiting like a bird on a Japanese screen, as patient
as any fisherman, for its prey to come within striking distance. The
heron's size and its great bill render it safe from most enemies. But
it sometimes overestimates its ability. Audubon recorded one on the
Florida coast that, standing in deep water, up to its belly, struck a
fish too large for it. The fish dragged the bird for several yards, now
on the surface, now underwater. Finally, after a severe struggle, the
heron freed itself. It was exhausted, and stood near the shore, head
turned away from the sea. As if, Audubon said, it was afraid to make
another attempt at fish catching.
A more serious encounter for the bird was recorded in _Field and
Stream_ magazine. The heron had caught a shad about a foot long.
He tried to swallow it, but it was too big to go down. He tried to
disgorge it, but the fins of the fish, acting as barbs, kept it from
slipping backwards and out. The result was death for both bird and fish.
CAUGHT BY A CLAM The oyster catcher, a large black and white relative
of the sandpiper, feeds on, among other things, shellfish. Mussels and
oysters look like hard nuts to crack, even with a stout, wedgelike bill
such as that of the oyster catchers. The oyster catcher's favorite
feeding times are when the tide has fallen and the shellfish are
first exposed to the air and before they have closed up their shells,
and again when the tide is rising and the shells are just beginning
to open. The oyster catcher stabs into the shell, and with its bill
cuts the strong adductor muscles that hold the shells of the bivalves
together. The rest is easy. But a danger lurks here: what about
stabbing into too big a shellfish, or making an inept stab? And this
very thing has happened. On the South Carolina coast Mr. W. P. Baldwin
found a trapped, drowned bird. It was held, with the tip of its bill
caught in the shell of a hard-shell clam, as if in a trap. Apparently
the rising tide had flooded and drowned the bird.
The raven eats most anything, living or dead, and except for man
has little to fear in the northern forests where it lives. Yet from
Wisconsin comes a record of one that met his death through a porcupine.
The porcupine's quills are a dreadfully prickly covering that one
would think would protect it from most encounters. Yet one animal, the
fisher, kills and eats it as a matter of course, and wolves and bears
sometimes eat them without too many ill-effects from the spines. The
slow-moving porcupine has little regard for automobiles, and many are
run over on country roads. A porcupine is too big and tough for a raven
to kill and the Wisconsin raven had probably fed on a dead porcupine.
Stuck through its gizzard was a quill, and another, which had
apparently caused its death, was stuck in its heart, having apparently
worked there from the digestive tract.
Many small insectivorous birds eat spiders as well as insects. This
they do almost with impunity in temperate latitudes, where only
occasionally do spiders make webs strong enough to trap a bird. But
in the tropics, where there are more large spiders, their webs must
be a greater hazard to birds. That the hazard exists in both climes,
however, is shown by a goldfinch reported caught in a spider's web in
Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and a dusky flycatcher caught in a spider's
web in Cameroons, West Africa.