Scratcher of heads, rubber of bellies
A Douglas’ squirrel chews through the outer part of the cone to get to the seed underneath, like we would eat corn on the cob except that we are interested in the corn not the cob. A lovely little squirrel, and native too. Taken at Leadbetter Point State Park on the Long Beach Peninsula in Washington.
These Canada geese (or cacklers? I can’t tell the difference between small Canadas and large cacklers) were eating at Rest Lake in a heavy rain when they tilted their heads back to swallow, but the difference in the poses reminded me of people acting naturally before they see a camera but posing when they realize they’re being photographed.
A coyote runs past in a frosty meadow, obscured in heavy fog, with a cackling goose in its mouth.
As the sun rose, I noticed a group of alligators in this marshy section of the freshwater lagoon at Huntington Beach State Park but didn’t realize why they were there. Then one suddenly lurched forward and scooped up a little crab from the mats of organic material (algae? bacteria?) floating in the water, and then another did it, and another. It was remarkable how quickly they would go from floating motionless to catching the crabs and back to floating motionless.
Bullfrogs are voracious predators and not native to the Northwest but they are also a food source for a variety of animals that have learned to eat them. This large bullfrog was I think killed by a family of otters that came through earlier, it looked like one of them had caught the frog and eaten its front legs and a bit near the back before leaving. The heron was happy to eat what the otters left, dunking the frog a couple of times in the water (birds like herons and bitterns do this at times with their prey when near water) before getting it positioned in its beak where it could swallow the frog whole.
No but I do have a frog in my throat.
Great blue herons normally swallow their prey whole, I believe this fish head came courtesy of a family of river otters I had seen moving through shortly before. Although effective hunters themselves, I’ve seen herons shadow otters before to try for scraps from the on-the-move otters (and seen otters make feints towards the herons if they think they’re getting too close and might grab more than just leftovers).
A Columbian white-tailed fawn enjoys its breakfast while sitting in a meadow on a rainy spring morning at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge. I got some 4K video of it too, it’s hard to see the rain in the video with the slower shutter speed but you can certainly hear it pounding down, and you can see the deer’s eating motion as it occasionally stops eating to listen. I’ll post the video once I learn how to edit it.
Everyone gets their dinner as an elk calf nurses from its mother while she and another cow eat the grasses of Elk Meadow in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park.
This fall the status of the Columbian white-tailed deer was improved from endangered to threatened. I’d guess this young buck, eating in a meadow beside Long Lake, is one of the offspring of deer that were captured and moved to Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge as a part of the recovery efforts. I saw him in late December, one of his antlers had already fallen off but the other was not yet ready to let go.
Boolie 