Two links in the food chain
“In nature I find grace tangled in a rapture with violence; I find an intricate landscape whose forms are fringed in death.” - Annie Dillard
A few days after I wrote about the mute swans in their narrow little pond near my company’s fence, a fox attacked their nest and destroyed their eggs. Later they abandoned the pond in moved into a corporate reflecting pool where now they swim peacefully with the geese there, since they no longer have anything to defend.
Another swan couple built a nest in a precariously exposed spot between the parking lot and the main road. This nest was featured at the end of the YouTube video mentioned in my last blog entry. There they sat on four eggs. The female did most of the sitting and the male puffed and charged at curious pedestrians and passing joggers for weeks. On late Tuesday afternoon one little cygnet hatched out. And by Thursday morning the baby and the eggs were gone, victims of a red-tailed hawk according to employees of the office building overlooking the nest.
Red tailed hawks are among New England’s most magnificent predators, fierce and proud, beautiful and graceful in flight. Often I hear one shriek overhead while I’m in my garden and when I look up I see a hawk impossibly high in the sky, circling lazily without a single flap of its wings. Not long ago a pair of red tails was doing courtship rituals over my house, soaring, plummeting, calling out, and eventually flying off close together.
But a favorite food of these gorgeous creatures is the small, cute fluffy babies of other animals. Most swans and geese only have one clutch of eggs a season, unless they lose the first one very early, but hawks have to eat. Some animals are more productive – ten days ago I videotaped a mother mallard in my office park swimming around with 10 little ducklings each the size of a tennis ball. And mallards often have 3 or 4 clutches a year. But studies have found that only about half of all mallard ducklings survive their first 30 days in this world, because hawks and foxes and coyotes and weasels all have to eat. I haven’t seen the mallard family in over a week.