As a point of fact, I eat baby birds. I’m talking about eggs, of course. But saying I eat eggs is a rather euphemistic way of admitting that I eat baby birds. Snakes also eat baby birds—eggs and otherwise.
At midday yesterday, I stepped outside to drag a hose over
to irrigate my Mayday tree and heard the nesting robins pitching a fit in the
canopy. One solid glance at the tree revealed why: a four-foot bull snake was
coiled in the branches near the robins’ nest.
The snake was looking for lunch—in this instance, the fuzzy
baby birds in the nest were lunch.
As a human, I’m funny about things. By funny, I mean I tend
to make impractical or inconsistent judgments about the natural world. For
example, watching a robin eat baby worms to survive doesn’t faze me. But a
snake eating baby birds to survive—well, isn’t that wrong?
A little study of the scene revealed that the snake had
already eaten. There would be no saving the little robins.
So, I performed my most human of duties: I poked at the
snake a little with a broom handle, just to give the robins some semblance of
justice. Then I fetched my smartphone and a Cold Smoke beer so I could bracket
a few photographs—four of which I’m sharing today, including one with the can
of Cold Smoke on the ground for a sense of scale.
After getting a few pictures, I gave the snake some
distance and allowed it to thread its way back down to the ground and slither
away. We all have our roles to play, whether or not we admire one another for
it.
—Mitchell Hegman
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