Welcome To The Food Chain
I get a kick out of stories like this one: It seems birdwatchers in Eastern Scotland were all atwitter (pun intended) when they spotted a very rare bird. The red-rumped swallow is not native to Britain but one showed up, apparently blown in on the wind. So the bird was spotted by avid birders. These folks, in turn, called all their friends and pretty soon there was a mob of binocular-wielding bird fanciers all happily watching the bird. Unfortunately, someone called another kind of birder, apparently.
And Mr. sparrowhawk came and ate the red-rumped snack.
News of its appearance at Lunan Bay spread quickly, and soon it was the centre of attention for birders armed with powerful binoculars and telescopes.
The species was last spotted in the area 20 years ago and has only been seen in Scotland on a handful of occasions.
But just as the crowd was enjoying a particularly good view of the vagrant after it settled on the television aerial of a farmhouse, a sparrowhawk appeared, seized the bird in its talons and flew off with its rare snack to a tree stump.
The sparrowhawk, a small raptor, is a fast and silent assassin and preys on more than 100 small bird species.
Mike Sawyer, of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, said: "We were horrified. There is no doubt that it was a red-rumped swallow. We watched it for about 20 minutes and got a rather grainy photo of it. Then suddenly this sparrowhawk came crashing through, grabbed it, and that was the end of it.
"We had just phoned people to tell them of this rare occurrence, and then we had to ring them back to tell them it had been eaten."
Bwahahaha. I wish we could hear that phone call. But, on the bright side, we now can answer this question: why is there a vulture hanging around Britain?
A vulture has been spotted cruising around England and Wales to the bemusement of wildlife experts who think it has escaped from a sanctuary in the Midlands.
The Indian white-backed vulture was snapped in royal Richmond Park in London where it drew a crowd of twitchers - but there have also been sightings of the creature in Norfolk, Snowdonia, Bodmin Moor and Cornwall.
Royal Parks gardener Steve Read, who took the photo, tried to tempt the bird with meat but it was playing hard to get - and was being mobbed by more typical avian inhabitants of the park.
The answer: leftovers.
By BubbaB, Wednesday, 15 November , 2006 @ 5:46 pm
MMM… Red-rumped swallow…