20 December 2008

Opportunistic foraging as an ecomorphology

A starling with one of the last black currants. It didn't last very much longer after the shutter click.
I suppose that even your typically voracious (which is to say, extensively voracious) starling will hesitate a moment before swallowing a frozen berry; scaled, and supposing the human gullet to have the capacity, it must feel a lot like swallowing a whole frozen grapefruit.

2 comments:

piranha said...

oh, that's marvelous!

Graydon said...

Thank you!

I could wish it was in better focus, but, well, ploufulent starling plus horrid angle plus that berry really wasn't around long, so I'm highly pleased to have got the shot at all.

Starlings are pretty tough, it turns out; very kinetic, and very difficult to focus on a pile of multi-coloured fluff. I may have one or two more around somewhere that don't suck, including the loss of composure over the difficulty of getting peanuts out of the peanut feeder.