A researcher overheard a poignant encounter in a salt marsh in Georgia when a fish pulled a baby sparrow to a water grave.
Coast sparrows usually balance their nests in the swamp grass, but researchers believe climate change has caused the area’s tides to rise abruptly.
As a result, one bird’s nest was flooded, leaving its chick exactly in the path of the fish.
In a video shared on Twitter, a mummichog can be seen breaking through the nest and making a meal out of the hour-old chick.
Ornithologist Corina Newsome shared a video of a young MacGillivray’s beach sparrow attacked and eaten by a mummichog, a common east coast fish
Corina Newsome, an ornithologist at Georgia Southern University, saw the deadly attack while watching a 2019 video of dozens of sparrows’ nests in the swamps of Brunswick, Georgia, about 80 miles from Savannah.
The birds face a variety of threats from predators to habitat loss.
One subspecies, the dusky sand sparrow, became extinct in the late 1980s.
Others, such as the Cape Sable beach sparrow, are endangered due to habitat destruction from flooding and adaptation to farmland.
Nestled in a salt marsh in Georgia, the sparrow nest was flooded. That gave the opportunistic mummy dog a chance to break through the nest and make a meal of the chick
If sea sparrows place their nests too high, their young are vulnerable to predators. Too low, and they can overflow. Newsome’s observations indicate that predators can come from unexpected directions
Newsome watched a video of a baby MacGillivray’s beach sparrow, a subspecies mostly preyed upon by owls, raccoons, mink, and even snakes.
But this time the killer came from under water.
According to The Post and Courier, there were record-breaking high water levels in the Southeast in 2019, and more than a third of the nests Newsome captured on video were flooded.
“ In the video, you can see the water gradually rise in the nest and the chick floating on the water, ” she told Live Science.
These sparrows need to strike a delicate balance – placing their nests too high will keep their young open to birds of prey and other hunters.
But too low, and the nest will overflow and their chicks will drown.
Climate change has caused record highs and flooding in the southeast, threatening the MacGillivray’s nesting, nesting and feeding grounds
According to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, the sparrows will “ shift nests higher or lower in swamps to address these risks. ”
Miraculously, the hour-old chick in this nest managed to float for a while.
But as the grainy images revealed, he was unable to stop a fish leaping over the edge of the nest.
It was a mummichog, an everyday east coast fish known to live in 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 “ punched the chick in its mouth ” until it drowned.
Mummichogs, also known as mud minnows, are opportunistic feeders.
They normally eat plants, insects, algae and even other fish, but perhaps the nestling bird turned out to be too tempting a treat to ignore.
Newsome cried out when she saw the clip of the attack.
“I sent videos to everyone,” she told the newspaper. ‘I was like,’ You’re 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 Sable sparrow.
But the Fish and Wildlife Service has refused to classify it as a protected species.
The birds are also threatened by rising sea levels due to global warming, according to the Center for Biological Diversity.
“Climate change is projected to raise sea levels by as much as 3 to 9 feet this century, destroying the sparrow’s breeding and foraging 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 must endure this gauntlet among all these different nest predators.”