FISH EATS BIRD! [Ref]
It has become commonplace to hear about birds eating fish. The government gets out reports on the relation of fish-eating birds to fish abundance. The cries of commercial fisheries have caused inquiries to be instituted into the food of cormorants that were supposed to be eating the fish before they grew up enough for us to eat. The scarcity of salmon in some of our Northeastern streams has caused the allocation of biologists to study the predation of kingfisher and merganser on salmon fry and fingerlings.
But fish get some of their own back by eating birds. It's not as spot news as the "man bites dog" angle, but it's certainly less widely known.
To one who has fished for large-mouth black bass among the cypress trees and the bonnets of water hyacinth, and seen the bass strike savagely at surface lures as soon as they hit the surface, it comes as no surprise to find they strike at, and catch, such birds as Maryland yellow-throats that flutter across close to the surface of the water.
Young ducks, too, are good game to the large-mouth, and probably many a young duck finds its way into the maw of a bass. On a pond where bass had taken many young ducks I heard a story of a fisherman who made a floating model of a mother duck, powered it with a propeller, and attached to it by lines of various lengths several floating models of downy ducklings. In each duckling was concealed a hook. The whole flotilla was set afloat, and drifted across the pond. Mother steamed ahead, with young following. Soon the bass, used to a duck diet, began to grab the ducklings. When the model was retrieved several large bass were taken.
In Northern waters, where Northern pike, or jackfish, as they're called in the North, abound in duck-nesting waters, pike are accused of eating enough ducklings to affect the survival of the broods. Many a marshland traveler has reported young ducks and young grebes diving, to be seen no more. He's blamed the pike. Sometimes perhaps the young bird has simply come up unobserved. But enough pike's stomachs have proved to have young ducks in them to demonstrate pike do eat ducklings. Strangely, in some areas, pike eat many ducklings; in others they do not eat them. But it's not alone young birds or small birds that get eaten by fish.
A twenty-four-inch bass is recorded as having been caught while it still had the legs of a full-grown coot projecting from its mouth. From beak to tip of its outstretched legs the coot measured seventeen inches and it weighed one and one quarter pounds.
Angler fish weighing between forty and fifty pounds have been found to have eaten birds. One had the band from a Manx shearwater in its stomach, and another had an adult American merganser. In tropical and subtropical seas the examination of birds seemed to indicate they had been attacked by some fish and seized by the feet, but were able to escape, and a white-winged black tern off Corsica has been seen to disappear under the water, presumably dragged under by a fish.