I was blown out of the water...

As I have never seen a Moorhen catching a fish.

My thought was that moorhens only eat algae and aquatic plants, but not so, as I will show you in here that they do indeed eat fish.

Due to my ankle not functioning properly yet, I have to go about slowly in short distances in order not to walk on it too much. So, the idea came to us to go and visit the dam at our local golf course as there are always landscapes that one can get on camera. The dam is about 50 meters from the parking lot, and there are level walkways for one to walk on.

But on this day getting landscapes was the furthest from my mind, as my wife shouted Look, the hen has got a fish! As usual, I thought that she was joking, but to my shock I saw that she was correct and my camera was nudging me to take a shot. Lol.
Yes, believe it or not, that Moorhen (Gallinula chloropus) had a fish in its beak, and as you can see it wasn't a very small fish.

There are many Grass Carps in the dam, and this looks like a small grass carp, as grass carps grow very big.

And here was another one, patiently waiting for something that stirred below the water in the dam.

Bang! The Moorhen grabbed it.

And dragged it to a hole in the bank of the dam. Maybe the hen has youngsters in the hole.

Now this below is called the king of the feathered fishing birds. Do you know what kind of bird it is? If not, I will introduce it and its fishing action to you in another post soon.

I can tell you that the dam is alive with fishing birds. On this occasion I also caught shots of a Tern catching a fish, but I didn't want to put all the pictures into one post. The strange thing is that there were no swallows to be seen, but I think it is not their breeding season yet. I did some good posts. We had a look at the reason for the White-throated Swallows (Hirundo albigularis) being absent and they are not around here during the months of June and July.

I can tell you that I was so glad to get all these shots of the Moorhens catching fish as I have never seen it before, but one is never too old to learn. Nature holds many secrets and one only has to diligently search for the secrets to reveal themselves. This is one of the best adventures in nature, for us at least, as we always go into nature with an expectation of uncovering something.
Such is life.

I hope you enjoyed the pictures and story.

Photos by Zac Smith. All-Rights-Reserved.

Camera: Canon PowershotSX70HS Bridge camera.

Until next time, cheers!