Yesterday was one holiday, and today is another (don’t ask me who schedules these things without any breathing room): National Where The Hell Did This Come From? Day, and I’ve got a nice example for you, discovered in the back yard here at Walkabout Estates.
First off, ignore the brown wormy thing, which is just a millipede that was passing through as I snapped the image. My brother tells me this is a sunfish, but there are several species and the state of this one isn’t making it easy to pin down, so Family Centrarchidae anyway. The thing is, we’re not terribly close to any water source, and I even know a four-hour time frame of its appearance in late afternoon since I had been through that area earlier and it wasn’t present.
Best guess, of course, is that it was snagged from the neighborhood pond by an osprey and accidentally dropped, either as the bird was passing or as it landed in a tree to knock off its meal, though this seems odd in itself; ospreys have wicked talons and can easily hang onto something as small as this, and even the damage to the carcass seems less than I would have thought they’d inflict in capturing a fish from the water and hauling it off through the air. Not to mention that there does not seem to be any osprey living nearby or frequenting the pond, even though they make the occasional appearance. Mid-afternoon isn’t any time for raccoons, opossums, or neighborhood cats to be slinking around, especially inside the fence. I’m not the kind that watches all of those TV forensics shows so I didn’t try evaluating the angle of the wounds or the impact impression underneath, and it’s too late now; this was a couple of weeks ago. So I’ll go with clumsy osprey and leave it at that I suppose, always wondering what sinister story might really lie underneath. It wouldn’t be the first time…