Great Blue Heron and the Snake

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Great Blue Heron with Snake
This morning I went to Viera Wetlands.  When I drove around the "click" ponds, I found a Great Blue Heron trying to eat what I think was a Banded Watersnake.  The snake seemed to give the heron pretty much all it could handle.  The bird was far away, and the heron was pretty much back lit, so the photos aren't quite what I normally would post.  But I thought the scene was interesting enough that I'm going to share with you my photos anyway.

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Great Blue Heron fighting with Snake

The heron appears to have just captured the snake when I first saw it.  He had pierced the snake with his bill, but the snake was still very much alive, and it coiled itself around the heron's bill.  Later, the snake began to strike the heron's head an neck repeatedly, to no avail.  The heron let go of the snake several times; it seems to have wanted to get a hold of the snake around its neck and head, rather than near the tail.  After several minutes of struggling with the snake, I had thought the heron finally killed it, and it began to swallow the snake.  But the snake had not yet given up.  Even though its head was already swallowed, the snake again coiled its tail around the heron's bill, preventing the heron from fully swallowing it.  Unfortunately, the heron flew to the other side of the click ponds at this point.  I drove the car to the other side, but now the heron was even farther away.  The final photos have even less detail, but you should be able to see that after the snake finally died, the heron was able to remove the coils from his bill and swallow the snake.

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Great Blue Heron with the snake coiled around its bill
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The Snake tries to strike the Great Blue Heron
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Great Blue Heron
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Great Blue Heron with a snake that appears to be dead
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Great Blue Heron Beginning to Swallow the Snake
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The Snake's One last Trick
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Finally!
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This is going to take a while to digest

Comments

  1. That's a little insane. Who catches this stuff in real life? Way to go Scott...Attenborough! :)

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  2. The more I watch Great Blues and Great Egrets, the more they seem like top predators on par with most raptors. Awesome sequence.

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  3. Absolutely fantastic to capture the entire sequence in photos. Great work,Scott.

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