Primary Content Credit: Elizabeth Hunter
Corina Newsome of Georgia Audubon told Science Friday that she was studying how the birds adapt to mammalian predators like mink, rice rats and racoons.
“I had a video camera on the nest to record any potential nest predation,” Newsome told producer Katie Feather. And that’s when she observed something she’d never seen: a small fish, called a mummichog, attacking a hatchling in a nest that had been flooded by the tide.
“When I saw the fish jump into the nest, I remember screaming,” she said. “I couldn’t even watch the rest before I started texting all of my friends, and my colleagues and my advisor, like, ‘A fish is in a seaside sparrow nest. What is happening?’”
Birds have often been seen swooping down into the water to grab fish for dinner. But now a scientist in Georgia has captured first-of-its-kind footage of a fish chowing down on a bird, still in its nest.