Recently I was standing at the kitchen sink, sipping my morning coffee as I stared out the window into the backyard at the new day. I noticed a robin that was acting a bit peculiar. He would hop to my left suddenly, then just as suddenly he would hop back to the right. He had done this jig two or three times when curiosity overwhelmed me and I put my nose closer to the picture window framing our back yard.
To my left, in the flower garden containing the bird feeding station, on the ground, was a rather large earthworm that was desperately trying to wiggle away from the dancing robin. I knew that birds ate worms, if for no other reason than the ubiquitous aphorism, “the early bird gets the worm”, had been drilled into my mind. I always had pictured this early bird as a robin. I had also always pictured the robin swallowing the worm whole, in one fell swoop, much like a sword swallower ingurgitating his weapon, slowly and steadily. It had never occurred to me that the bird might consume the worm by biting off small piece after small piece. The thought that immediately passed through my brain was that poor worm, “Mother Nature sure is a Bee..aacchh.”
Then I started thinking about the hundreds, nay thousands, of worms, crickets, grasshoppers, crawfish, minnows, and occasional small frog that I had threaded fishing hooks through in preparation of their being an enticement to force that same hook into the mouth of a fish that I would later filet and consume. “Mother Nature sure is a Bee..aacchh.”
I could paint a similar word picture of the red tail hawk that consumed a squirrel he had recently killed in the back corner of our yard. Twas not a pretty picture with fresh rodent intestines everywhere. There must be something attractive about this animal on animal violence as so many nature shows focus on this aspect of the animal kingdom.
And so it goes in the suburban wilds outside the kitchen window of our home.
But I did feel sorry for the worm.
While in Africa, I seriously wanted to witness a lion taking down a gazelle. It didn’t happen and my traveling companion was happy about that. We did, however, come upon a pride that had just finished a meal. Many members still had the blood spatters to prove it. And so it goes…
I once stumbled across a video on YouTube set in a “nature park” in China. They had an area with 2 or 3 lions. They would, on occasion, let an antelope into the enclosure with the lions while a trolley load of tourist watched. Ouch.
Dang, y’all be violent in Missouri, now.