This is an observation, not a problem to be solved.
About 10 minutes after I released birds to free-range forage till dark, one of my game stags started acting odd near the pen of a cock. I thought it was going to time to confine the stag based on how he was holding his tail and the noises he made. Something was odd about where he was looking. Then he started running and stumbling through a good sized patch of ragweed making sound like produced when trying to take down a large grasshopper or Chinese Mantid. His sister tried to get in on action but could not get close enough to see what he was after. After about 30 seconds he captured and dispatched the mouse he was after. He was out of breath from the effort even though he never ran with it from his sister. As he stood over catch to get over the oxygen debt, I checked what he had, a pregnant House Mouse within a couple days of giving birth. I took it to show kids and the stag looked a little miffed.
It was maybe a minute after mouse was dispatched before I got kids out to see what is afoot. We could still see movement in the pregnant mouse's abdomen. I then ripped the mouse open to liberate the fetuses so the kids could see them.
The remains where then taken back to stag and his sister. He got the mouse and his sister got the fetuses. They juvenile chickens act very different when they have vertebrate prey items and do not even want to share with me. The stag took a good 5 minutes of processing before he ingested the mouse whole.
Video of stag and sister snatching eats away.
About 10 minutes after I released birds to free-range forage till dark, one of my game stags started acting odd near the pen of a cock. I thought it was going to time to confine the stag based on how he was holding his tail and the noises he made. Something was odd about where he was looking. Then he started running and stumbling through a good sized patch of ragweed making sound like produced when trying to take down a large grasshopper or Chinese Mantid. His sister tried to get in on action but could not get close enough to see what he was after. After about 30 seconds he captured and dispatched the mouse he was after. He was out of breath from the effort even though he never ran with it from his sister. As he stood over catch to get over the oxygen debt, I checked what he had, a pregnant House Mouse within a couple days of giving birth. I took it to show kids and the stag looked a little miffed.
It was maybe a minute after mouse was dispatched before I got kids out to see what is afoot. We could still see movement in the pregnant mouse's abdomen. I then ripped the mouse open to liberate the fetuses so the kids could see them.
The remains where then taken back to stag and his sister. He got the mouse and his sister got the fetuses. They juvenile chickens act very different when they have vertebrate prey items and do not even want to share with me. The stag took a good 5 minutes of processing before he ingested the mouse whole.
Video of stag and sister snatching eats away.
