The Life Of Birds 4. Meat-Eaters (1 of 14)

The Life Of Birds

Sparrows in South Africa.
Like all sparrows, they eat pretty well anything; insects, fruit and particularly seeds.
They convert that diet into their own flesh, which is the richest of all foods: meat.
So they themselves are much hunted.
A falcon is also looking for a meal And it has one.
Meat is such a rich food that a falcon need only kill once a day to sustain itself.
So there's plenty of time for sitting around on the perch.
Nice work if you can get it.
But getting it is not necessarily all that easy.
This hillside in New Zealand may look bare, but in fact I'm sitting in the middle of an immense, active colony of shearwaters.

The adults at the moment are out at sea fishing, but these are their burrows and inside of almost every one, there is a fat, juicy chick.
And this bird knows it.
This is a parrot, a kea, but not the sort of parrot that is content just with fruit and nuts.
Its beak can certainly cope with such things, but it can also give a bite that kills.
The keas tour the shearwaters' burrows, listening.
They've heard something.