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| TITLE: | Mallard duck drowning newly-fledged juvenile Sand Martin
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| INFO: | "Once the Mallard had grabbed the juvenile Sand Martin she returned immediately to the water's edge, dunked the hapless martin and drowned it. Again, quite incredible and shocking. She then went through the same process as before of dunking and stripping feathers and 'softening up' the bedraggled corpse, taking several minutes, before swallowing it down.
She then went back onshore and settled down to snooze, probably waiting for the next fledgling to land on the shore or in the water, though I believe she'd eaten three already today, assuming it was the same duck which seems likely - and those three victims were just the ones I'd actually wintnessed. I'm not sure how long this 'rogue' Mallard duck had been behaving in this unusual way, at least a week maybe two, so she may well have killed and eaten a couple of dozen or more fledgeling Sand Martins during that time - perhaps a significant proportion of that colony's third clutch and maybe more than the total taken by birds of prey throughout the season. It's not unusual for birds like herons to have one 'rogue' individual that cottons on to a ready source of prey such as eggs or chicks at a tern colony which can suffer badly as a result (this happened with the Sandwich Terns on Brownsea Island last summer and almost again this summer) - but a Mallard? - it just don't seem natural !! As a footnote, I've also seen video footage of Foxes killing and eating newly-fledged martins that failed to fly off in time from the foreshore below the nesting-bank - it certainly seems that only the quick-witted fledgelings escaped - natural selection in operation." August 2011 (Goosander Hide) |
| TECH: | Nikon D700, Nikkor 200-400mm f4 zoom lens at 400mm with 1.4x teleconverter, ISO 1600, f8, 1/1500 sec.
Benbo tripod with ball head. Cropped image about 70% of frame. |
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