Eternal Struggle of the Spotted Bird
On that particular morning, I was chasing two pairs of Greater Coucals along Powai lake adjacent to Hostel 12, IIT Bombay. They were of course very adept at hiding and I was getting disappointed. All of a sudden, I heard sharp cries of a bird from a nearby tree. I rushed there to see a male House Sparrow hanging from a branch and fluttering desperately.
While I was wondering why the sparrow was not able to fly away, to my horror, I saw a Green Vine Snake catching it by its throat. The snake started to slowly tighten its grip and lift the sparrow up. From underneath the tree, I could not see them clearly any more. So I climbed the tree and reached an adjacent branch.
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| The deadly bite … | grips the sovereign flight. |
The snake was curling along a branch and balancing itself perfectly. The sparrow was completely helpless against the superior strength. With every passing moment, its fluttering kept fainting …
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| The power superior … | over’s the struggle eternal. |
… and after nearly an hour, the struggle was finally over. The triumphant snake then swung upwards and rested its head on the branch to let the sparrow slip along its slender body. Content, it rested on the branch for a while.
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| The graceful beast … | ponders, “What a feast!”. |
The eternal struggle between the pray and the predator was over. The pray survives sometimes and the predator sometimes. An onlooker like me has only one role, to watch, to mourn the pray and to wonder at the irony of the predator’s own struggle for survival.
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| Soon crawls onto the next… | but none ever flew over the nest. |
