Opinion: Nature is full of battles between predator and prey, but this particular encounter is anything but straightforward
As an ornithologist who has spent decades studying birds in the wild, I have come across some dramatic battles between predators and prey. Sometimes the predator wins. More often the prey escapes.
When it comes to birds catching fish, typically fish are quickly caught and swallowed with little fuss⎯not so in the video clip shown here of a heron trying to dispatch a wily, slippery eel, which I recently captured using a mobile phone attached to a telescope in Kinsale.
The grey heron is one of our best known birds. They are instantly recognisable from their elegant height and head plumes, their grey and white plumage, and their habit of standing patiently, knee-deep in water looking for their next meal. Non-migratory in Ireland, grey herons breed annually and typically live 5-10 years, though they can live up to 20 years.
On the other hand, the European eel is seldom seen by the public, even if many of us remember from school learning about their remarkable, mysterious lives.
Thought to originate from the Sargasso Sea in the western Atlantic, young eels migrate to Europe and spend most of their lives in our rivers, before eventually returning to the Sargasso to breed. In fact they breed just once in their lifetime, sometimes living as long as 50 years, before immediately and dramatically dying in their place of birth like some piscivorus Shakespearian tragedy.
And so it was with some empathy I recently watched this hapless eel trying to avoid being swallowed by a determined fisher with its strong dagger like beak. In the video you see the heron struggling to get a firm grip of, let alone to swallow, its slippery meal, regularly dipping the eel in water for lubrication.
When the heron does first manage to swallow its slippery prey, you can see the eel ‘swimming’ in an undulating fashion within the heron’s throat trying to escape.
Remarkably, our Houdini-esque fish does escape. Sadly for the eel, however, freedom is short lived and the whole slightly nauseating process of being mandibulated and swallowed is repeated until, after a five minute struggle, the eel disappears into the heron’s digestive tract.
Now the heron ruffles out its feathers in celebratory triumph. Yet even as the video ends, you can see from the way our heron nervously flicks it’s beak that the eel continues to cause some discomfort from within the bowels of its avian nemesis.
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ