{"id":1090,"date":"2015-07-07T17:43:49","date_gmt":"2015-07-07T22:43:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2015\/07\/07\/150707-craneeatingfish\/"},"modified":"2022-05-28T16:10:20","modified_gmt":"2022-05-28T21:10:20","slug":"150707-craneeatingfish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2015\/07\/07\/150707-craneeatingfish\/","title":{"rendered":"Fish Dinner"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We were giving some friends an afternoon tour of Horseshoe Bay and were driving across the low water crossing where Slick Rock Creek empties into Lake LBJ when I spotted a crane* diving under the water, presumably in pursuit of a fish. Sure enough, he surfaced shortly thereafter with a large silver fish grasped firmly in his beak.<\/p>\n<p>The crane walked slowly over to a shallow water-filled depression in the rocks and dropped the fish, which was still weakly wriggling. The depression was just deep enough to prevent the fish from escaping back to the lake.<\/p>\n<p>The bird stood over the fish for a brief moment, seemingly contemplating his next move (or, perhaps, praying over his next meal).<\/p>\n<p>After another brief pause, he bent down, picked up the fish, and&#8230;well, you can imagine what happened next. OK, you don&#8217;t have to imagine, because video. You might want to go to full-screen for the playback.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/132869908\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I stripped out the audio from the movie to spare you the exclamations of &#8220;yuck!&#8221; at the point the fish went down the bird&#8217;s gullet and seemed to pause for a last wriggle. That could have just been the crane&#8217;s throat muscles at work&#8230;yeah, we&#8217;ll go with that.<\/p>\n<p class=\"quote\">If this has whetted your appetite (no pun intended) for another video of a bird swallowing an impressive meal, try <a href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2013\/07\/29\/130729-lowcountrywildlife\/\">this one from an earlier trip to South Carolina<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><i>*I&#8217;ve referred to the bird as a crane, but to be honest, I&#8217;m just guessing at that. It does vaguely resemble a sandhill crane but the coloring doesn&#8217;t really match. However, the photos and video aren&#8217;t sufficiently clear, and I&#8217;m not sufficiently knowledgeable, to render a positive ID. Feel free to email me if you have a better idea.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We were giving some friends an afternoon tour of Horseshoe Bay and were driving across the low water crossing where Slick Rock Creek empties into Lake LBJ when I spotted a crane* diving under the water, presumably in pursuit of a fish. Sure enough, he surfaced shortly thereafter with a large silver fish grasped firmly&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2015\/07\/07\/150707-craneeatingfish\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Fish Dinner<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[59,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-texas-hill-country","category-wildlife-birds","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1090"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1090\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10462,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1090\/revisions\/10462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}