Hey Tweets

Rob Sandelin writes: "a deer mouse scampered out from under cover. It gave
me an interesting connection. I feed birds who hang around, and mice eat
the seed spilled by the birds. The mice attract a weasel to which I am
alerted to by the birds I feed. And around the circle goes....."

Such a connective chain helped explain the presence of large quantities of
coyote scat one spring below the trees containing the large (and completely
human-habituated) Great Blue Heron colony in Vancouver BC's Stanley Park
directly adjacent to the Vancouver Park Board offices during breeding season
of both herons and the park's coyotes. Initially, a small mystery.

One would assume the nocturnal coyotes were loitering for the odd nestling
taking a header out of the nest (or being exasperatedly chucked out for
their incessant rivet-gun clatter of a begging call), but this happened so
rarely that either the coyote(s) involved were the most optimistic of their
breed or they were there for something else. As a clue, I'd like to say that
their scat was full of hair, but could a superficial look really
differentiate between the presence of mammalian hair and avian down in
coyote crap? In that spring, not enough nestling herons fell out of their
nests to account for the relatively high numbers of scat deposits found
below the nesting trees. No clues there.

Then I noticed a lot of half-eaten seed-balls littering the ground beneath
some of the nesting trees. Well, a number of the GB's nesting trees are
American sycamores *Platanus occidentalis*, replete with seed-balls.
Suddenly, the chain of consequence appeared: the herons bashed around in the
trees in the day-time knocking seed-balls to the ground and, at night, out
came the mice and rats to feed on them, and Mr Coyote (who, at that time of
year, was just picking up groceries for the missus and the new litter of
kids) moseyed by to feed on *them*.

>From the number of droppings beneath those trees, plus half-eaten
seed-balls, there was either a lot of coyotes feeding on a few seedivores
(is this even a real term or a neologism? I looked for the seed-equivalent
of carnivore, fructivore, piscivore but, perhaps missing the obvious, came
up blank for the equivalent), or a one or two coyotes cruelly interrupting
the last meals of a lot of mice and rats.

Michael Price
Vancouver BC Canada
loblollyboy at gmail.com

Every answer deepens the mystery.
- E.O. Wilson
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