No one, not even New Yorkers, can be prepared for a showdown between a rat and a blue heron.
The majestic bird made Central Park an impromptu restaurant recently, settling in a grassy area to dine on its latest catch, which happened to be the rat stuffed in its gullet.
Blue herons, which are commonly seen in both New York City and New York state, typically nest near waters like ponds or marshes, where they watch for frogs or fish, according to NYC Parks.
But instead of devouring the rat right away, the blue heron took its time. Video shows the large bird tried to make the most of its hearty catch, holding the lifeless rat in its beak for a few minutes while it looked for a place to settle down and eat.
Then, in one fell swoop, it gobbled the rat right up.
While rats aren’t typically part of a blue heron’s diet, they can and will eat “any kind of small animals they come across,” Dr. Dustin Partridge, NYC Bird Alliance’s director of conservation and science, told the New York Post.
Those animals, according to NYC Parks, include fish, frogs, reptiles, small mammals and birds. And the occasional rat or two, if it happens to be in the right neighborhood.
The video, Partridge told the New York Post, should serve as a reminder that birds, including the blue heron, will encounter things like rats as they “forage on natural resources.”
“Herons eating rats is probably far more common than most people expect,” Partridge said.
Watch: Heron gobbles New York City rat up in one fell swoop
A Reddit user, who said they took the video, wrote in a post that they were by Harlem Meer, a water body in the northeast corner of Central Park doing a yoga with a friend when they spotted the bird “casually being all dinosaurian.”
It didn’t take long for them to realize that the blue heron was “hunting a huge rat,” according to the Reddit user.
The “battle” did not end well for the huge rat, according to the Reddit user, who said the “process was not a sight for the faint of heart.”
“The rat fought hard and valiantly for it’s life, but was mortally wounded by the heron’s beak, and then held by it’s neck and shook till it asphyxiated,” according to the Reddit user.
The Reddit user compared the blue heron’s behavior to that of a snake, which are known to devour rodents whole.
