Wild Wildlife: Nature Red in Beak and Claw

Partly because the trees are now bare of those damn obscuring leaves and partly because everything is flitting around looking for food to stave off the cold season, I’ve been seeing a lot more wild birds in the zoo lately. This includes birds like the Carolina wren featured above (in the single semi-decent shot of it I’ve ever gotten; taking pictures of a bird the size of a child’s fist and with the frenetic energy of a speed addict is not the simple task that it seems) and the ruby-crowned kinglet captured here:


It also includes slightly less elusive birds, like this tufted titmouse:


And this white-breasted nuthatch:


And of course any number of cardinals:


But the other birds that I’ve been seeing a lot of lately, and in more dramatic situations than usual, have been hawks—mainly red-tailed hawks these days.

Although I would see red-tailed and red-shouldered hawks in the trees even in summer, I’ve never before seen them making so many attacks. I watched one eat some small feathered creature near the bird house:


And I saw another with its beak still stained red from whatever prey it had recently devoured.


And then, as I was intently photographing the wren next to the peccary exhibit (where a lone peccary was braving the cold), I heard the shrill cry of birds and looked up from my lens in time to see a hurtling shape plunge into a yucca plant within the exhibit and then fly out again, fast as a bolt of lightning.

I think I can safely say that the peccary and I were both equally startled, although only I swore. (All of its hair stood on end, though, which I think is the peccary version of swearing.)

The hawk didn’t catch anything in that particular strike, but from a glance at the suddenly silent, empty branches, it was clear that the other birds knew it was only a matter of time.

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

Wild Wildlife

I admit, I didn’t see the mantis myself. Instead, I saw a man holding his young son up as they both peered into the grasses growing alongside the path to the “Great Cats” enclosures. I was curious but didn’t want to pry—until I heard the little boy exclaim loudly to the world, “It’s a PRAYING MANTIS!!!”


Everyone else, focused on large mammals, paid no attention, and in a moment the boy and his father, too, moved on. But I stopped to observe the mantis as it made its way up and around various grasses, sometimes clinging, sometimes climbing, depending on the force of the wind that tossed the stems hither and thither.



Nor did I see the first of these three little frogs, balancing like sentinels on the lily pads of the water around Lemur Island—my mother noticed them. (She’s always had a fondness for frogs, in spite of a traumatic childhood encounter when, as she tried to chuck one under the chin, it bit her.)


But I did see this squirrel, gnawing and chittering on a tree behind the small-mammal house:



And I spotted this deer gamboling along in the vast new (and otherwise empty) elephant yard:


“You’re not an elephant!” I told it, but this did not seem to make much of an impression on the ungulate.

And finally, freezing my fingers off as I took (not very good) pictures of a yellow-bellied sapsucker (the best-named bird ever), I got a decent shot of a white-breasted nuthatch:

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}