The other day, at high tide, just were the tidal flow of Back Creek passes under the road to the beach, there was a group of Common Eider and this one Common Loon feeding on crabs. I assume that the unusually strong flow of the flood tide had swept the crabs from their bed elsewhere, and the constriction of the passage under the narrow bridge was concentrating them just at that spot, since I rarely see either the Eiders or Loons feeding there on a normal tide. There was such an abundance of crabs that both Eiders and the Loon were coming up with a crab on every dive, and they had to be close to the surface since Eiders are not great divers. The loon, of course, is. In fact, in most of the world, what we call Loons are called “Divers”. If I remember right, our Common Loon is the Great Northern Diver in Europe. Anyway, name asside, the Loon would be under water for moments at at time, and, then, on the surface, it would play with the crab a bit before eating it…perhaps the “play” was actually utilitarian…maybe the Loon needed to get the crab aligned properly to swallow…but it certainly looked like no mother had ever taught this particular Loon not to play with its food. I watched this mini-feeding-frenzy for about 20 minutes and, while it moved out away from the bridge in that time, it did not diminish.

Olympus OM-D E-M10 with 75-300mm zoom. 600mm equivalent plus 2x digital tel-extenter for 1200mm equivalent field of view. Processed in Snapseed and Photo Editor by dev.macgyver on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.