A researcher found a distressing encounter in a Georgia swamp when a fish dragged a sparrow to an aqueous grave.
Coastal sparrows usually balance their nests in swamp grass, but researchers believe climate change has caused a precipitous rise in tides in the area.
As a result, a bird’s nest flooded and put its cave right in the fish’s path.
In a video shared on Twitter, a mummichog can be seen breaking the nest and making an hour-long breeding meal.
Ornithologist Corina Newsome shared a video of a MacGillivray coastal sparrow being attacked and eaten by a momichog, a common east coast fish
Corina Newsome, an ornithologist at the University of South Georgia, saw the deadly attack as she reviewed the 2019 video of dozens of sparrow nests in the swamps of Brunswick, Georgia, about 80 miles from Savannah.
Birds face a variety of threats, from predators to habitat loss.
One subspecies, the dark coastal sparrow, became extinct in the late 1980s.
Others, such as the Cape Sable coastal sparrow, are endangered due to habitat destruction by flooding and adaptation to farmland.
Located in a marsh in Georgia, the sparrow’s nest had been flooded. This gave the opportunist mummichog a chance to break the nest and make a baby food.
If coastal sparrows nest too high, their young are vulnerable to predators. Too low and can flood. Newsome’s observations show that predators can come from unexpected directions
Newsome was watching a video of a baby sparrow from a MacGillivray baby, a subspecies typically preyed upon by owls, raccoons, minks and even snakes.
But this time the killer came from under the water.
In 2019 high tides were recorded across the southeast and more than a third of Newsome’s video-recorded nests were flooded, according to The Post and Courier.
“In the video, you can see the water gradually rising into the nest and the chick floating above the water,” he told Live Science.
These sparrows must strike a delicate balance: if they place their nests too high, they leave their young open to birds of prey and other hunters.
Too low, though, and the nest will flood and its chicks will drown.
Climate change has caused record tides and floods in the southeast, threatening MacGillivray’s nesting, breeding and feeding areas.
According to the U.S. Fisheries and Wildlife Service, sparrows “will move nests higher or lower in swamps to combat these risks.”
Miraculously, the hourglasses of this nest managed to stay afloat for a while.
But, as the granular material revealed, he was unable to hold a fish that jumped over the edge of the nest.
It was a mummichog, a common east coast fish known to inhabit brackish coastal waters.
According to this month’s Newsome report in the Wilson Journal of Ornithology, the momichog pulled the little bird below the surface and “threw the chick in its mouth” until it drowned.
Mummichogs, also known as mud mines, are opportunistic feeders.
They usually eat plants, insects, algae and even other fish, but perhaps the nest turned out to be too pleasant to ignore.
Newsome shouted out loud when he saw the clip of the attack.
“I was sending videos to everyone,” he told the newspaper. “He was telling me, ‘You won’t believe what I see.’ ‘
Conservationists are concerned about MacGillivray because it is threatened by the same factors as the endangered Cape Sable sparrow.
But the Fisheries and Wildlife Service has refused to classify it as a protected species.
Birds are also at risk from rising sea levels caused by global warming, according to the Center for Biological Diversity.
“Climate change is expected to raise sea levels by up to 3 to 9 feet this century, which would destroy sparrow breeding and feeding habitats near the coast,” the center said.
University of Georgia ornithologist Robert Cooper told Post and Courier that Newsome’s findings add “to a growing group of knowledge … about songbirds having to run this glove among all these different nest predators “.