by Pa Rock
Nature Lover
One of the souvenirs I brought home from my last extended (2-year) stay on the Japanese island of Okinawa (2010-2012), was a large, oblong rock which I pulled out of the surf at Torii Beach, a place where I would often go to read, relax, collect sea glass, and watch the young people para-gliding and wind-surfing. The rock was oblong, smooth with a sandyish surface, and about the size of a loaf of bread. I used it as a doorstop at my apartment on Okinawa, and when the movers showed up to ship my stuff back to the States, the rock found its way into my gear.
Today that rock from the East China Sea sits on my porch in the Ozarks, a curiosity from another life. It seldom gets noticed, and when it does it's usually by an animal, often a squirrel or dog, who finds that it remains a very good salt-lick. I can see the rock from my spot at the living room window where I sit and type each day.
Yesterday I happened to notice a gray squirrel sitting atop my rock from the Orient. His tail was toward me and he would have been facing out into the yard except for the fact that he was kneeling onto the rock, busy doing something with his face. I assumed he was enjoying the salt which still remains strong in the rock after fifteen years, most of which it has been sitting outside in the elements. As I sat watching the furry fellow instead of typing crap about Trump, a little bird suddenly zoomed into the picture and crashed into the squirrel knocking him off of the rock. The dazed squirrel looked around for his attacker but the bird had flown away. The squirrel climbed back on his perch dragging something small with him, it looked like maybe a little patch of dark clothing, and commenced once again nibbling on his treat.
The bird, a small blackish-gray creature with a long, straight beak, circled back looking every bit like a small needle-nosed fighter jet piloted by a kamakazi. He strafed the squirrel causing the increasingly annoyed rodent to duck and cover. The dive-bombing continued for a minute or two until the beleaguered squirrel took his treat and scampered off. The show was over.
The furry creature obviously had something that was important to the feathered attacker, and my first thought was that maybe it was part of a baby bird, something that would have put a mama bird into fighting mode. But it looked more one-dimensional, like a fragment of paper or a piece of cloth. Whatever it was, the little bird wanted it and was hellbent on having it. He (or she) had a serious case of attitude.
Today, somewhere in the Ozark hills, there is a bird who knows that it can fight a squirrel - and a squirrel knows it, too!
Not every lunch is free, or even pain-free.
1 comment:
I don't know the identities of either the bird or the object of attention, but it's a marvelous description of mobbing behavior. If a creature enters into a bird's territory and becomes a threat, the threatened bird or birds will attack by diving on the offender. It's a case of offense is the best defense. Sometimes, the diver will actually bite or claw the divee. It's commonly observed as blackbirds dive bombing a hawk. I once saw that at a great distance and I had nothing to compare the sizes to reality. I finally realized the birds were much larger and very far away. It was a red-tailed hawk mobbing a golden eagle. It's possible that the bird had no interest in the object of the squirrel's attention but was protecting its territory and nest. 65 million years later, they still have a dinosaur's attitude.
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