The splendor of God’s creation was on full display in NYC over the weekend, as a gawking bystander filmed a blue heron devouring a rat.
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It seems an avid yoga practitioner noticed the circle of life going down on Saturday while posing in Central Park with a pal. The graphic video uploaded to Reddit captures a heron deftly swinging a sizeable dead rat from NYC by its head, preparing to swallow the unlucky vermin whole.
The bird seems to muster its strength as it stares out at its human gawkers.
Amazingly, the chunky cousin of Chucky Cheese managed to slide down the long-necked bird’s gullet. For a fleeting moment, the rat’s tail dangles from the heron’s beak, a chimera of gore.
Then, there’s a tense moment in which the heron seems to gaze at its onlookers. “Yeah, I just murdered and consumed a furry mammal. What’ve you done today, other than stretch?”, it seems to ask.
Indeed, the Redditor who caught the shocking footage seemed disturbed by the moments leading up to filming.
“About 10 feet from us was a great big blue heron, just casually being all dinosaurian,” the Reddit user wrote.
“Soon we realized it was hunting a huge rat,” they continued. “The battle did not go well for the rat, and 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.”
NYC Residents Celebrate the Heron Who Dined on a Fat Rat
Though the footage is harrowing, many rat-beleaguered NYC residents hailed the heron as a hero. Some even thought the concrete jungle where dreams are made of should employ the killer bird.
“Send this bird to the subway stations, PLEASE!,” one Reddit user commented under the footage. “Him and his other 20 heron friends to that rat infested Popeyes joint,’ a second user quipped. “Man, I love dinosaurs,” a third user gushed.
However, other denizens of the internet showed concern for the heroic heron.
“Just hope the rat hasn’t consumed any rat poison. What a gorgeous bird!”, one user wrote. “Poison is ineffective, rats just reproduce faster when the population goes down. It only hurts the birds and other wildlife,” another user added.
Indeed, the beloved Flaco the owl, who escaped from the Central Park Zoo last year only to be found dead this past February, was found to have rat poison in his system.
However, this rat was one of the estimated three million rats in the Big Apple. With any luck, it was a poison-free meal.