A researcher found a disturbing encounter in a salt forest in Georgia when a fish pulled a sparrow to a watery grave.
Coastal sparrows usually balance their nests in the swamp grass, but researchers believe that climate change has caused the tides in the area to rise sharply.
As a result, one bird’s nest flooded and placed its hatchery in the fish’s path.
In a video shared on Twitter, a mummy chog can be seen breaking through the nest and making a meal of the hours-old hatch.
Ornithologist Corina Newsome shared video of a brooding MacGillivray’s coast cap being attacked and eaten by a mummy chog, an ordinary East Coast fish
Corina Newsome, an ornithologist at Georgia Southern University, saw the deadly attack when she reviewed the video she took in 2019 of dozens of sparrows in the swamps of Brunswick, Georgia, about 80 miles from Savannah.
The birds face various threats, from predators to habitat loss.
One subspecies, the dark dark cap, became extinct in the late 1980s.
Others, such as the Cape Black and White Sparrow, are threatened by habitat destruction due to flooding and adaptation to agricultural land.
The sparrow’s nest flowed into a salt moss of Georgia. This gave the opportunistic mummy chic the chance to break the nest and make a meal of the baby chick
If sparrows at sea place their nests too high, their young are vulnerable to predators. Too low, and they can flood. Newsome’s observations show that predators could come from unexpected directions
Newsome is watching a video of a baby MacGillivray’s sparrow at sea, a subspecies usually caught by owls, raccoons, mink and even snakes.
But this time the killer came under water.
There were record-breaking tides across the Southeast in 2019 and more than a third of the nests Newsome took on video were flooded, according to The Post and Courier.
“In the video, you can see the water rising incrementally into the nest, and the chick floating on top of the water,” she told WordsSideKick.
These sparrows need to balance a fine balance – if they place their nests too high, it leaves their young open to birds of prey and other hunters.
But too low, and the nest will flood and their chicks will drown.
Climate change has caused record tides and floods in the southeast, threatening MacGillivray’s nests, breeding and feeding areas.
According to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, the sparrows will move nests higher or lower in swamps to combat these risks. ‘
Miraculously, the hours-old hatch in this nest managed to stay afloat for some time.
But as the grain material revealed, it could not restrain a fish that jumped over the edge of the nest.
It was a mummy chog, an everyday fish on the East Coast known as brackish coastal waters.
According to Newsome’s report this month in the Wilson Journal of Ornithology, the mummichog pulled the baby bird below the surface and ‘hit the chick in its mouth’ until it drowned.
Mummy chogs, also known as mud lice, are opportunistic feeders.
They normally eat plants, insects, algae and even other fish, but the nesting was perhaps too tempting to ignore.
Newsome screamed loudly when she saw the clip of the attack.
“I sent videos to everyone,” she told the newspaper. “I was like, ‘You are not going to believe what I see. ”
Conservationists are concerned about the MacGillivray because it is threatened by the same factors as the endangered Cape black and white sparrow.
But the Fish and Wildlife Service refused to classify it as a protected species.
According to the Center for Biological Diversity, the birds are also threatened by rising sea levels caused by global warming.
“Climate change is expected to raise sea levels by 3 to 9 feet this century, destroying the sparrow’s breeding and feeding habitats near the coast,” the center said.
University of Georgia ornithologist Robert Cooper told the Post and Courier that Newsome’s findings contribute to a growing body of knowledge … about the songbirds that have to manage this glove among all these different nesting predators. ‘