Hello All,
Yesterday along North River Road in Auburn I observed 7 Bald Eagles. 2 were at a nest and the rest were sub-adult birds along the river.
This may have explained the relatively low number of ducks and gulls.
Interesting to me is the relationship between prey and predator. How do the ducks and gulls determine when it is time to take off when an eagle is nearby? A drake Common Merganser was near one of the eagles that was perched fairly low in a tree along the river's edge. The merg must have read the eagle's body language, in some way calculated the eagle's height and estimated acceleration rate and determined that its take-off speed from the water was not sufficient to escape capture and that the best strategy was to stay on the surface, keep an eye on the eagle, swiim upstream and dive only when necessary.
One of our list members alerted me to a diving ducks vulnerabiity to eagle attack while underwater.
The mergansers approach to the situation seemed the best available given the situation it was in. Or am I crediting the merg with too much "intelligence".
Happy birding,
Dan Nickerson Freeport
--
--
Maine birds mailing list
maine-birds@googlegroups.com
http://groups.google.com/group/maine-birds https://sites.google.com/site/birding207 ---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Maine birds" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to maine-birds+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit
https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
0 comments:
Post a Comment