Heron noms bunny, proves non-existence of God

May 18, 2014 • 10:19 am

by Matthew Cobb

These dramatic pictures by Dutch wildlife photographer Ad Sprang popped up in my Tw*tter feed from my one-time student, Sam Pearson (@smprsn). They appeared on the Daily Telegraph website and show a grey heron pottering about in the Dutch countryside, near Vianen, and then coming across a bunny.

I’ve just noticed that these photos are six years old, appearing back in September 2008 (the ways of the internet are very odd), but why should we let lack of novelty get in the way of a good story?

Children and the faint-hearted should look away now:

Sprang said to the Telegraph:

The rabbit screamed loudly when it was hanging helplessly in the bill of the big heron. I managed to make two photos of this and the bird flew away with the rabbit in its bill. The bird landed in a water-place nearby. I could quickly turn the car and took several photos of the rest of the story.

“The heron tried to kill the rabbit by putting it under water. After about half a minute the rabbit was almost dead but as it moved it was put under water by the heron again.

“When the poor little rabbit had finally died the heron swallowed the rabbit completely. It was not that easy because of the size but finally the heron was successful.

“I have often seen herons catching preys like mice and fish. but catching a rabbit was a surprise.”

It is well known that Darwin challenged those who believed in a beneficent creator to look on the ways of the parasitoid wasps whose offspring devour caterpillars from the inside and think again. If there is a God, he must be Cthulhu (btw Darwin didn’t say that). This striking example of predator by a hungry (and pretty smart) heron just underlines three points to me:

a) Animal life is just stuff eating other stuff.

b) It’s all about recycling the carbon from one organism to another.

c) There is no God. Nice bunny, nice heron. Play nicely together. But no. One gets eaten by the other. And then something else comes along and eats the heron, (repeat till the sun swallows the Earth, if we are lucky).

I took the photos from here. The photos are all credited to Ad Sprang/Barcroft Media.

75 thoughts on “Heron noms bunny, proves non-existence of God”

  1. At least the heron killed the bunny before swallowing it – I guess that a struggling bunny with its relatively powerful back legs would have been highly uncomfortable to swallow.

    1. … which suggests the this is not the heron’s first bunny.
      I remember not reading the “dissolve tablet in a glass of water” instructions once and swallowing the thing dry. That is not a mistake I will make again. Swallowing a live bunny is likely to be even better for the memory.

    2. The surprising thing is, the heron knows how to drown a (mammalian) prey? That’s a bit too much intelligence, isn’t it?

      Drowning a fish (or even a lizard) may not be a very successfull strategy, eh?

      1. I once saw a heron catch a mole, but the heron just used its bill to stab it to death before swallowing. That may not work with a rabbit, who would run off if you let go of it for a second. It seems that herons are pretty smart, or at least Dutch ones are ;-).

        1. Yeah, I assume birds stabbed their prey (while possibly held them down with their claws), not holding them underwater like KSM waterboading …

          I do not get that dutch herons are smarter? (..shush.. is there an insider joke I missed here?..)
          😀

  2. I think this disinclines the bunny to believe in god a lot more than it disinclines the heron!

    So much of this in the world, and the creationists just mewl “oh look at the pretty flowers” (or baby leopards or whatever). They should read Zimmer’s Parasite Rex, or possibly something about cockroaches.

  3. Herons are such gourmands.

    Yeah life is really all about stuff eating other stuff. It sucks that we have empathy sometimes. Even Ender Wiggins probably cursed the empathy that helped him destroy his foes while killing part of himself.

    1. I’m a-thinkin’ that any middle school male who would get a kick out of watching the heron have its way with a small rabbit ought to add to his field trip schedule a trip to the . . . uh, whut’s the “nice” term? . . . “abattoir,” and stay there for several hours. Let them get a real good look at what they’re eatin’ between the buns at fast-food joints, and put their petty solipsistic concerns in a more proper perspective. Would give self-regarding education critics an additional item about which to gripe.

      One winter a couple of times I delivered bags of salt to a local packing plant. It’s used to salt down/dry out skins before sending them off to make leather coats and shoes/boots. (I’ve contemplated my eel skin boots coming to life.)

      I starkly remember watching with shocked, horrific fascination the pneumatic air gun squarely centering the forehead of the hapless steers, and the gentleman repetitively hooking them up and hanging them upside-down, and pressing on with his duty on behalf of the aesthetically-delicate and discriminating and demanding Amuricun consumer.

      Though the cow was obviously dead, the spinal nerves were still functioning, as evidenced by the spasmodic movements as the butcher proceeded with his necessary, traditional craft. As inured and desensitized to his task as he appeared to be, with the steam of body heat enveloping him, he stopped to briefly contemplate the inconvenience of the cold-induced rapidly-clotting blood besotting his utensils and apron.

      1. So you are saying that humans kills their food faster (except plants, poor organisms) and with less anxiety and pain. Sure.

        1. No, I’m not saying that. I’m simply telling you what I observed, and what every fatuous, entitled, overbearingly-discriminating picky-picky customer who goes to a restaurant perhaps ought to observe to see how their restaurant (and home) dinner comes to them and, if they can’t handle it, perhaps they should consider becoming a vegetarian. I saw my grandfather, without any prior warning or merciful consideration given to me as a six year-old, wring the neck off a hen, which I practically considered a pet. “Nature (and Humanity apparently)red in tooth and claw,” and all that, eh?

          1. “if they can’t handle it, perhaps they should consider becoming a vegetarian.”

            And by the same idiotic logic you should only drive if you build your own car? Or you should only live in a house you build yourself?
            And you should only eat bread if you grow, harvest and mill your own grain? Do you really want to follow your fucked up logic to the end?

            I used to hunt – now I mainly am an angler, and we in our family raised most of the meat and veggies we eat ourselves, and of course did our own butchering. We did it for the quality of the meat and I have no problem with either of those activities.

      2. When the world recognises me as the best choice for Ultimate Dictator, one of the things I shall do to decrease meat consumption will be to ban commercial butchery. Slaughtering still to be done professionally, and humanely. Then you get to take away the carcass.
        Want pig for breakfast? Then you get a pig. A whole pig (or divvy it with your friends), except for the grunt.
        And yes, you do have to comply with waste disposal laws.
        (P.S. : I can’t take up the post until after the end of August – I’ve got vacation booked.)

        1. If I had to kill my own food I would definitely be a vegetarian.

          I don’t have any moral objections to eating animals (after all, animals eat animals all the time) so long as they’re humanely killed, but I’m a pathetic wimp when it comes to the gory bits.

          2. Several years ago, I read a piece by a former Ronald McDonald who had become a vegan. He lamented, “As Ronald McDonald, I told children that hamburgers grew on trees!”

            I wonder if any kids really believed that?

        2. I don’t kill my own meat for the same reason that I would take a terminally ill animal to a professional to be put down: I lack the skill to kill humanely and refuse to inflict unnecessary suffering.

          1. One time, when I was a vegan, the university Mountaineering Club smacked a yearling deer with the minibus. Broke it’s back, smashed it’s pelvis. There it was laying in the middle of the road with a half dozen hairy carnivores standing around wailing about what to do about it.
            The vegan of the party was the one who put it down with an ice axe through the skull. Not professional or pretty, but quicker than bleeding out in the middle of the road.
            Then it was the vegan who put the beast into a bin liner, hung it in the cottage for a couple of days, and dressed it into joints on the Sunday. for the carnivores to eat during the week.
            Ain’t no room for sentiment. Even if you’re a carnivore. (Which I am now. I stopped wasting my effort on fighting other species battles for them.)

          2. Guy I knew at work bought a house in the backblocks, and with it came a deer. It was a stroppy darn thing, but his mother-in-law thought it was cute. Well, eventually, it went the way of all domesticated livestock. Shortly thereafter they were having a barbecue and the mother-in-law, munching away, asked “What is this? – it’s delicious” and without thinking he answered “Bambi”.

            His wife wouldn’t speak to him for a week…

          3. I guaranteed bad weather for this summer by buying a barbecue.
            The freezer contains a couple of packs of Bambi burgers (which is how I always intended to describe them) along with more conventional link and square sausages, oink steaks, and moo burgers.
            I’ll have to find bunny burgers too. Hard to find these days – at least, not tarmac-tenderised.

      3. I was about maybe 10 when I visited an abattoir, and the scnene was horrible (I think as a prank by my uncle).

        Funny that what was kept in my mind is the fact that after all that, and we had slabs of beef (the food kind, no longer looks like animals at all), and it still moved, pulsating. A hunk on bloodless meat, and it was pulsating!

        I decided to eat hamburgers and sausages since that, no steaks! No similarities to god-given-animalicities, just plain food please .. and no kitchen duties please ..

        (of course I know better now …)
        😀

      4. Though the cow was obviously dead, the spinal nerves were still functioning,

        Not trying to be pedantic here but the whole point of the air bolt is to not kill the animal but to render it permanently unconscious. The animals experience ends at that instant. It’s called stunning the animal while leaving the brainstem active so the heart keeps pumping to empty the blood. As horrible it may be for onlookers to witness, it is almost the most humane way to go. Certainly better than the way wild animals die which is to be torn apart or swallowed whole and feeling every bit of the experience.
        Not Kosher of course, or Halal. Here the whole point is to satisfy some savage ritual where the victim of the sacrifice must know god by having its throat slit in order to experience listening to some self congratulating fool chant over its life draining away.

        1. “It’s called stunning the animal while leaving the brainstem active so the heart keeps pumping to empty the blood.”

          Okay. I.e., pump the blood out through the pneumatically-induced wound (so that, as a practical business matter, there’s less blood for the butcher – and management/owner – to be inconvenienced with)?

          1. Not quite. The bolt stops the animals mind so that it can’t feel what happens next which is that the heart pumps the blood out through what the next guy in line does with his knife.

          2. I guess what you describe is what happens in large facilities. I was at a small facility, observing one guy do the stunning, hide-stripping, disemboweling, and longitudinal sawing.

  4. Jurassic Bunny-park.

    I’ll take the option behind the door marked “Carbon recycling”, thanks. (Sounds nicer than Chtulhu…)

  5. but animals don’t have souls! They’re just pretty toys that God made for adam to amuse himself with. Obviously nothing that awful would happen to a human being…unless they deserved it for looking lustfully at someone, or being muslim, or whatever.

    Dinosaurs killing little furry mammals. It’s like something from Jurassic park.

  7. Just last week I was driving down our street when a large crow flew past my windshield, carrying something pink and fuzzy. A number of sparrows were hot on its tail. Crows gotta have their noms.

  8. 1. “Animal life is just stuff eating other stuff.”
    2. Humans are animal life.
    3. So: Humans eating humans is just stuff eating other stuff.

      1. Donald Swann’s cry that “I won’t let another man past my lips!” doesn’t sound like the anti-cannibalism stance that it was originally.
        Eh?

  10. So now we know who framed Roger, how and with what. (Perfectly, with his beak.)

  11. It’s literally a bunny! Not a wild rabbit. It was someone’s tame pet that escaped, or was released into the wild when it became too much trouble. I think there’s another lesson here somewhere.

    1. The fact that that’s not a wild rabbit is what makes me think that the photos were staged.

      1. I’ve seen lots of non-grey rabbits hopping around in residential areas in the Netherlands (think parks and the like). Either released by dumb pet owners, or escaped by themselves. And they breed freely with the local wild rabbits.

        A black, white or multicoloured rabbit anywhere in this country would not surprise me at all, because there are so many domesticated genes flowing into the feral gene pool.

  13. And to think that there are people who believe that birds aren’t dinosaurs.

  14. To me the most interesting thing about this is the way the heron killed the bunny. Its usual prey is fish, and holding a fish under water doesn’t kill it. Did it learn that mammals and birds can be killed that way? That means it has a bit of a taxonomic system in its head, or a rule like “If caught out of water, can be killed underwater; if caught in water, can be killed by keeping it out of the water…” I wonder what it does with a big frog.

        1. There’s a substantial meal at the end of it. That’s a major incentive to learning something sophisticated.

    3. Or maybe “if it kicks too much, hold it underwater.”

      In my old neighborhood, I would occasionally see black-crowned night herons catch and eat rats. They didn’t try drowning the rats—which they found either in or next to the river—just swallowed them alive.

      (Like most New Yorkers, even ones less fond of birds in general than I am, I was inclined to side with almost anything that was hunting rats.)

  17. I never imagined they could swallow a lagomorph that size. I guess not all dinosaurs are the same; an emu would choke on something the size of an apple.

    1. A couple of months ago I happened upon a rattlesnake trying to swallow a cottontail rabbit that was clearly much too large for it. If snakes ever choke on their dinners, I’d say that one was in danger of doing so.

      1. Did you ever see that picture that’s been floating around for a few years now of a Burmese python in the Everglades that swallowed an immature alligator only to have its stomach rupture? Snake most definitely do occasionally bite of more than they can (figuratively*) chew.

        *Because I know some smart alec is going to step in to say that snakes can’t actually chew.

        1. Yes, I’ve seen the python image. This guy was never going to get that far though — I wondered if it could spit up a rabbit stuck in its throat. Do the backward pointing teeth make that difficult?

          We have no smart alecs here. Everyone is painfully polite at all times.

          1. Actually, as I recall, most constrictors can regurgitate their last meal as a defense mechanism if attacked. I believe the effects are supposed to be two-fold: one, the sudden appearance of a half-digested critter is off putting to predators, and two, the sudden loss of the weight and bulk makes it easier for the snake to escape or fight back.

            And depending on the mood I was in, I’d be inclined to make the “snakes can’t chew remark,” so…

          2. “We have no smart alecs here. Everyone is painfully polite at all times.”

            Plenty of pedants, though. 🙂

        2. What probably happened there is that the snake failed to kill the alligator. Studies suggest that constrictors use the prey’s heartbeat (or lack thereof) to know when to stop constricting, but it only works properly with mammals.

          So the snake stops constricting before the alligator is actually dead, and the latter struggles after being swallowed, causing the rupture. Unable to get out, it eventually dies from suffocation.

        3. As a smart-alec snake biologist, I think ‘chew’ is a perfectly apt word for certain phases of oral prey-processing in species I’m familiar with. Oral prey transport (orientation and initial stage of swallowing) don’t count as ‘chewing’, but many snakes first subdue or kill prey mechanically by repeated squeezing and puncturing in the jaws, and some venomous snakes (especially elapids, my faves) chew most effectively, as the major jaw adductor muscles are also venom-gland compressors. One of my first papers was on elapids with reduced fangs that specialise in eating soft-shelled lizard eggs, which need to be chewed open with specialised bladelike teeth at the back of the palate.
          (I’ve also been known to refer to snake locomotion as ‘walking’ or respectively ‘running’ where it seemed appropriate…)

          1. Yeah, I’ve heard that king cobras are pretty well known for holding on and repeatedly “chewing” to work more venom into the wound.

          2. I once was walking in the woods and heard a strange peeping that sounded like a bird. I looked in the under brush to find a frog being nommed by a snake. It was so horrific and the frog kept peeping probably not even knowing there was a snake behind him trying to swallow him from his legs. It was a gartner snake & I doubt the snake would be able to eat the whole frog.

  18. In his Russian-literature-takeoff comedy “Love and Death,” Woody Allen’s character states that, to him, nature has always seemed like just an enormous restaurant. What we see here can be taken as strong evidence for this.

  19. example of predator by a hungry (and pretty smart) heron just underlines three points to me:

    Four points. “predation”, perhaps?

    Nice bunny, nice heron. Play nicely together. But no. One gets eaten by the other.

    That’s a P.T. Barnum-ism, isn’t it?
    Reporter : “Mr Barnum, how long will your exhibition of the lion laying down with the lamb continue?”
    PTB :“Until the end of time, m’boy. The end of time.Unless we run out of lambs.”

  20. YourTube is full of videos of Great Blue Herons eating just about anything that moves, so long as they can swallow it.

    STORIES: Working by my garden one day, I heard the familiar, “Yeep, yeep!” of a baby rabbit in distress: a neighborhood cat (calico-they seem to be more inclined to hunt) came running across the yard with a small rabbit in its mouth, the mother rabbit hot on its heels. Wishing to see the rabbit population reduced, I stepped out and “headed off” the mom, and the cat continued on its way with the yeeping youngun’.

    Another time I disturbed a rabbit nest while mowing and about ten little ones came crawling out (luckily I didn’t hit one with the mower; that’s a real mess)- they were too young to be out yet and couldn’t run, but slowly staggered to whatever shelter they could find. I thought, “the local cats are going to have fun tonight”. Sure enough, several times while I was sitting at my computer after dark I heard a distant, “Yeep, yeep!” as they were picked off, one after another.

    Actually, it’s ultimately not about “transferring carbon”, at all: what happens when an organism ingests another is simply a temporary “backpedaling” in our universe’s systems’ ongoing, inexorable collapse into entropy (chaos). I believe that life is almost inevitable on any planet that will support it, as organic life “agrees” with entropy- it is the most efficient and rapid way for entropy to increase, even though it APPEARS, to our brief period of observation, that there is a natural “trend” towards complexity.

    1. Complex story about complexity .. ha ha .. you sounded quite cold in describing the youngun’ fates, ever tried to write a thriller?

      😀

  21. Herons lived near me in Austin. Poop everywhere. They ate frogs by the pound and pooped by the pound.

    Recycled carbon from stars. That’s what we are. And we all give it back.

  22. Some religions claim that man AND animals were vegetarians until after the Flood when God gave Noah permission to eat meat. (Genesis 9:3)
    This means that killing for food was introduced by God, as apparently all animals survived from the Creation to the Flood by eating plants.
    Which means that predation, which causes some of the worst suffering in nature, was not due to the Fall, but was a deliberate, unnecessary and arbitrary innovation that God introduced much later.
    Of course, Gen 3:21 says that God made “garments of skin” to clothe Adam and Eve; and Abel was a shepherd who offered God “some of the firstborn of his flock and their fat portions” Gen 4:4
    It seems the first butcheries of animals were done by God and by Abel, not to eat, but to make God happy.

    1. I get so confused trying to find a coherent story line in the Bible. The contradictions outnumber the consistencies.

    2. Of course they want it both ways:

      1. The “kinds” were created in their current form on day 1

      2. Meat-eating only arrived after the flood

      So what did all those lions (and every other carnivore) do for a meal in the long-ish interval? Nosh on tulips? With canines? And if dog knew (as he surely did, being omniscient) that meat-eating was off the menu until after his rather over-reactive hissy-fit, why make all those carnivores on day 1 and watch them all starve to death. This must surely feature in “Some of God’s Greatest Mistakes”!

      It’s such b******s it just reinforces to me that most believers have never given any of this a single moment’s thought. And I reckon a large minority who profess to believe KNOW that, if they did, they’d be confronted by a large pile of things that are completely contradictory and would force them to either give up their religion or continue it as a facade. So they simply don’t look.

  23. I’ve just noticed that these photos are six years old, appearing back in September 2008…

    Worse than that, they date back to June 5, 2006. On Ad’s Personal Album on the website birdpix.nl you can find the first mention.

    One other picture in Ad’s Personal Album shows a cartoon that appeared in a Dutch newspaper on June 8, 2006, obviously inspired by Ad’s photos (which the paper had reported on the day before). The artist gave his opinion on how our biggest airport, Schiphol, is dealing with the environment…

  24. This past weekend, we saw an osprey fly past with (what we assumed was) a fish in its talons. I’ve seen this many times before, including having an osprey take a fish from the pond 50-feet behind my house.

    We did a double-take when we saw it was a bird in its talons(!); it looked like a robin, of which there is a superabundance around here right now.

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