Sushi anyone?
Most of us like to savor our fresh fish if we choose it off the menu. Creatures living out in the wild, however, have a different approach to consuming their meals. Instead of savoring, they usually prefer to go with a method called “throwing it all back at once.”
That’s not true for all wild animals, but it is normally the case for herons. The long-legged birds that do most of their hunting and gathering by sneakily watching over shallow water for potential prey don’t mess around when they do eventually catch something.
Heron don’t have teeth, so they don’t have much of a choice when it comes to consuming food. They throw everything down their gullet and allow their bodies to do the rest. That usually means that their stomachs digest most of the prey that they eat (even bones), and the portions of their meal that their digestive systems can’t take on are regurgitated in pellets.
Pretty gross, right? But herons have to do what they have to do, so that means the occasional indigestible pellet is thrown back up after meals. We don’t see the aftermath of the meal consumed in this video, though one could assume that the size of the fish (comparative to the stature of the bird) led to some routine regurgitation.
Because heron don’t have to chew their food, they often fall victim to the tried and true fault of one’s eye’s being larger than their stomach. As long as the bird can work the prey down into their stomach, they go for it, even if the act is the definition of being gluttonous.
This heron had caught itself a pickerel, and though the fish appeared to be bigger than its head, the long-necked creature didn’t think twice about it. After the bird picked the pickerel out of the water, it wasted no time sending it on a one-way-trip to its stomach. It struggled to even fit its catch within its beak, but after a lot of struggling and repositioning, it swallowed the pickerel… alive.
Not a great way to go out for the fish, but on the other hand, a tremendous way to fill an empty stomach for a hungry heron. Check it out:
