Now I know what cranes eat

The bird was walking with reverse jointed knees across the road. I stopped on my bike and nodded hello. His name was Max. Max was searching quietly. The sand hill crane, so often seen paired off in the spring, in a fall flock, or wandering around with a baby on the rarest of days, was comfortably alone. Max’s beak was not a mouth, but a tool, not eating, but probing. For what his audience would soon be aware. It looks at first like a bunch of sod, picked up to find the hidden worms. But the second jab with that post-hole digger of a tool revealed a mouse, or perhaps a shrew, completely alive and uninterested in being ended. Max calmly poked, sometimes lifting and tossing, other times leaving the creature on the ground. There was no concern for the quarry’s escape. I wondered. Do cranes eat small mammals? My wondering ended when the first chunk was removed from the now dead shrew, nameless, and swallowed down through Max’s snake neck. The tool separated a few more pieces, taking each visibly down the throat, before Max took all that remained and was as a python. I leaned transfixed on my bicycle, shocked into clarity and life by the breakfasting in front of me. I watched for uncounted minutes more as Max casually patrolled the lawn for additional shrews, perhaps content to guzzle worms for dessert.