A hooded crow scavenging among the beach stones on Salthill Promenade in Galway.
As I was sipping coffee on the Promenade in Salthill this morning, I noticed something moving on the sand near the waterline. It was a gull, flapping feebly and clearly dying. In a few minutes, it stopped moving. As it happened, a couple of guys were taking pictures of it (one of them moved the gull to a nearby rock for a better composition – the bird was no less dead but filled the frame in a more pleasing manner). Even as the two guys were walking around the bird, a grey (hooded ) crow landed near them and also began walking around the gull, sizing it up. Clearly, it wanted to be sure that the gull was no longer able to defend itself, but it didn’t want to delay too long either, in case other crows [it wasn’t wondering what aperture to use, either].
Even as the gull was expiring, it had been transformed from predator to main course – as I write this, it is probably well chewed by now.It was probably less than 2 minutes from the time the motionless bird was placed on a rock (and was thus more visible) to the time it had been spotted as a potential meal. Hopefully , the bird was actually dead, since that wouldn’t be a prerequisite for the crow to start feeding.