A quick meal

It was a much brighter day than the forecast suggested, and so I made a quick visit to Leighton Moss in the afternoon.  There was a lot of action in front of the Causeway hide, including this cormorant which was fishing in the weedy water.

This looks like a young pike to me, elongate and ideally sized and shaped for easy disappearance down the neck of this antediluvian-looking bird.  The timings of the burst of photos I took record that it was a mere 3 seconds from the cormorant bobbing up from its dive to the fish disappearing into its crop.

Now, does a cormorant kill a pike before it attempts to swallow it? I wonder because it is a fearsome fish with very sharp teeth. You would think it could do some damage internally before being subdued by digestive acids in the gut. It all happened too quickly to see if the fish was still alive when the bird surfaced. There again I have seen cormorants catching flatfish in the estuary that were very much alive as they were swallowed in more ungainly fashion than this.  I shall do some research.

Also in front of the hide were two little grebes actively fishing in the shallows, and apparently with less success than the cormorant. I did try very hard to get a shot of one at the moment of its duck dive, but every time I wasn't quick enough to record more than a splash and a rump of feathers.  I was impressed how feisty these little birds are with much larger ducks, occasionally pecking the shovelers roosting on the water if they wanted them out of the way. There is one extra of a little grebe catching the eye of Big Len.