Always something new to see when visiting Bosque and this was certainly a unique sight for me in all the times, I’ve visited Bosque. There were a lot of cranes and snow geese out in front of me along with a giant cloud of Starlings and Red-winged Blackbirds, there must have been a few thousand birds in this swarm. They were landing and then flying up and settling down right in amongst the cranes and geese. The next thing I know out from the group of cranes comes this crane with a Starling in its beak, at first, I thought I was seeing a Great Blue Heron, but a double take assured me it was a SH crane.
It didn’t take long for this action to catch the attention of other cranes and then the chase was on. As the crane with the Starling in its beak took flight I thought it was over for the Starling but all of a sudden the Starling was loose and flying off. Pretty interesting sight to witness and I was lucky to have captured some of the action.
Stellar work here, Louie. An amazing sequence. How did the crane manage to grab onto so many different points on the starling's body and not have the prey get away sooner?
max2k1 wrote:
Very interesting - amazing timing for sure. Wonder what happened for this to have occurred !?
Thanks for commenting. There were hundreds of Starlings and RWBB's swarming the cranes and this guy just reached out and grabbed one.
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Douglas L wrote:
Great captures, Louie! Was the sandhill going to eat the little guy? I had no idea blue jays would eat other birds until I saw a picture.
Thanks Douglas, I'm not sure if it would have eaten the bird or not but I'm told that indeed they will.
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YEG-Photog wrote:
Stellar work here, Louie. An amazing sequence. How did the crane manage to grab onto so many different points on the starling's body and not have the prey get away sooner?
Thanks, it looked to me as though the SH had a hold of the bird by its wing feathers and you can see when the bird got loose it was missing a bunch of wing feather.
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Holy crackers, Louie! I've never seen anything like this - and wonder if the crane would have indeed eaten the starling! Great, great images here. Unique in every way!
